Sen. J.D. Vance has little love for ESG investing — going so far to call the socially conscious financial strategy a “massive racket” during a 2022 interview.
But a review of financial disclosure forms filed by former President Donald Trump’s new running mate finds several investments that could fit neatly into an ESG portfolio.
Vance’s holdings include one company that provides mobile EV charging services, another that develops energy storage for microgrids and a third that sells organic gardening kits, according to Vance’s most recent financial disclosure forms. Those disclosures are from 2022, as Vance requested an extension to file his 2023 forms.
The investments add a new wrinkle to Vance’s mercurial relationship with climate politics.
In 2020 — two years before Vance won his Senate seat — the Ohio Republican told a crowd at Ohio State University that “we, of course, have a climate problem in our society.”
He also warned of using gas as a power source, saying it “isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.”
But in a few short years, Vance has completely changed his tune.
Once a Trump critic, Vance is now running alongside the former president. And Vance’s early climate concerns have been replaced by a condemnation of policies that seek to halt the march of global warming.
“Even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles,” he said in 2022.
Vance has taken aim at both EVs and government efforts to cut carbon emissions. In a 2022 interview with Breitbart, he described environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as a “massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country.”
How Vance’s portfolio came to include green-tinted investments is a footnote in the story of his rapid ascent to the heights of political and economic power.
Vance, 39, rose to prominence after his account of his hard-scrabble Appalachian upbringing “Hillbilly Elegy” became a bestseller. The former Marine did well too as a venture capitalist, working for funds based in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
His portfolio shows a broad range of holdings, according to the latest financial disclosure forms that Vance filed with Congress. The investments include up to $100,000 in an oil-focused mutual fund, as much as $250,000 in energy-intensive cryptocurrency and up to $300,000 in the conservative video platform, Rumble, which is a clearing house for climate disinformation.
One financial expert said it isn’t a surprise that Vance’s portfolio includes both the oil-focused mutual fund and an investment in the company that services EV charging stations.
“Anyone with a really large portfolio is going to be pretty well-diversified across a lot of asset classes, including those that ESG investors might overweight,” said Daniel Garrett, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
He added that smart investors are not hung up on political rhetoric, and that they often boast a portfolio that includes sustainable businesses because they are profitable and occupy an essential piece of the marketplace. At the same time, many investors hold some fossil fuel assets to hedge both sides of the energy future, he said.
Most of Vance’s fortune is derived from Narya, an Ohio-based private equity firm he co-founded, whose website says it aims to address “America’s most acute problems.” The firm was named after the ring of fire in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series.
In 2022, Vance disclosed earning $945,000 in profits from Narya. That was in addition to the $110,000 salary he earned at the firm while running for the Senate. Last August, Vance sold his ownership stake in Narya for up to $5 million, although he remains an investor in the firm, Senate disclosure filings show.
One of Narya’s earliest investments was in AppHarvest, a climate-focused indoor farming startup. Vance held a seat on the company’s board from 2017 until 2021, Senate disclosure documents show.
“Extreme droughts, raging wildfires and a rapidly changing climate threaten agriculture as we know it,” AppHarvest’s website says. “We’re growing in Central Appalachia using up to 90% less water and the power of the sun for a reliable indoor crop that grows regardless of an unpredictably harsh external environment.”
The company’s other backers included television personality and entrepreneur Martha Stewart. It went bankrupt last year.
Narya also has made investments in the farmland investment company Acretrader; a real estate financial technology firm called Valuebase; Vivek Ramaswamy’s pro-fossil-fuels asset management company Strive; and Hallow, which claims to be “the #1 prayer app in the world.” The fund didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Vance got his start in finance in 2015, two years after graduating Yale Law School. He worked as a principal at Mithril Capital, a private equity firm set up by the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
After the publication of Vance’s hit memoir, he moved back to Ohio and joined the Washington-based private equity fund Revolution, which was launched by AOL founder Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals and other professional sports teams. Vance was the managing partner of the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, an investment vehicle that makes bets on startups located outside of the coast’s VC hotspots.
Many of Vance’s sustainability-linked investments appear to date to his time at Revolution. For instance, Vance and the firm are both investors in energy storage developer Edisun Microgrids, EV charging service provider SparkCharge and the gardening company Back to the Roots.
Some of those startups have benefited from subsidies included in the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate spending law that Trump and Vance aim to roll back.
“There’s a lot of bad policy in there,” said Vance, who has introduced legislation to repeal the climate law’s EV subsidies. “I’d like to see a lot of it gotten rid of.”
“You’re going to see a broader manufacturing focus in the Trump administration, round two,” he told E&E News in an interview earlier this year. “It’s not going to be so obsessed with the green energy side of it.”
The Inflation Reduction Act provided $500 million for the decarbonization of a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio — Vance’s economically bereft hometown whose challenges he chronicles in his book. The Middletown Works plant will be repowered with natural gas and clean hydrogen, saving $500 million annually and preserving 2,500 jobs, according to the plant’s owner.
Reporters Kelsey Brugger, Avery Ellfeldt and Timothy Cama contributed.
Correction: Due to a data error by PitchBook, an earlier version of this story incorrectly claimed that Narya had invested in the nuclear engineering firm X Energy.
