Josh Hawley says Lucas Kunce wants to ban gas and diesel pick up trucks. Does he?

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Sen. Josh Hawley stood on a trailer near the Missouri State Fair last week and criticized Lucas Kunce, his Democratic opponent for U.S. Senate, over his call to eliminate the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“If you drive a pickup truck, if you drive a tractor, if you drive a trailer or a combine,” Hawley said. “Man, you just go and turn in your keys right now to Lucas Kunce, because he wants to shut it all down.”

It was a continuation of a claim Hawley made in his first attack ad on Kunce – that his opponent wanted to ban all gas and diesel trucks from the roads in Missouri.

Kunce’s campaign – which immediately responded with old photos of Kunce in pickup trucks during his military service – called the attack false.

“There’s a reason Hawley’s spending a million on false attack ads,” said Connor Lounsbury, a senior adviser on Kunce’s campaign. “It’s the same reason he won’t agree to a televised debate. He’s scared.”

The line of attack comes as Hawley and Kunce are locked in an expensive battle to win Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat. While Hawley is favored to win, Kunce has attempted to run as a populist Democrat willing to break with the national party. The two have been engaged in an increasingly intense spat in recent weeks, including a tense face to face encounter at the State Fair.

Hawley’s claim relies on an essay Kunce wrote in the American Prospect, a progressive policy magazine, in 2021 – a month before he filed to run for U.S. Senate that year. In the essay, Kunce argued that the U.S. needed to end its reliance on fossil fuels for the sake of national security.

“For our national security, we must adopt an industrial policy to rapidly and fully decarbonize our energy and transportation sectors,” Kunce wrote. “We need to ditch all fossil fuels, not just oil, the same way we ditched whale oil for petroleum in the late 1800s.”

The essay, which leans heavily on Kunce’s military experience, argues that the U.S. could decrease its involvement in the Middle East if the country no longer relied on oil, before going on to talk about global security concerns created by severe weather events attributed to climate change.

Hawley’s campaign seized on the line “we need to ditch all fossil fuels” and applied it to pickup trucks. If gas and diesel fuel are no longer used in the U.S., Hawley’s thinking goes, then there would be no more gas and diesel trucks on the road. Kunce’s essay makes no mention of pickup trucks.

“We know Lucas Kunce is nutty, but does he think Missourians are too stupid to read what he wrote?” said Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for Hawley’s campaign. “It’s all spelled out clear as day.”

The attack is part of a larger attempt by Hawley to paint Kunce as too liberal for Missouri and to tie him to unpopular policy positions espoused by national Democrats.

Hawley slams Biden’s climate plan

Over the past four years, Republicans have seized on rules and regulations from the Biden administration aimed at protecting the environment – sometimes before they are formally proposed – to portray the party as too extreme on climate change measures.

Instead, Hawley has talked about “unleashing American energy” and increasing domestic oil and natural gas production – even though the U.S. hit record amounts of oil and gas production over the past year.

But the increase in domestic fossil fuel production comes as the Biden administration is also seeking to decrease the country’s carbon footprint. Shortly after assuming office, President Joe Biden reentered the Paris Climate Accord, seeking to reduce carbon emissions by 2030.

Congress also passed legislation incentivizing a transition toward electric vehicles – offering tax breaks for the production and purchase of electric vehicles.

Biden’s climate change agenda comes as 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat to the country, according to polling by Pew Research in 2022. But only 23% of Republicans feel it is a major threat, a decrease from 25% of Republicans who viewed it as a major threat in 2010.

Kunce responded to Hawley’s claims with an ad of his own last week. In the ad, Kunce talks about his support for tougher border security – a policy stance typically espoused by Republican candidates.

He makes his pitch from inside a red pickup truck.

Star reporters Kacen Bayless and Jonathan Shorman contributed reporting.