Oh, Guess It's A Climate Election After All
One party does science. The other not so much.
As search and rescue efforts continue following Hurricane Helene — the storm killed at least 160 people across six states, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for — there isn’t much doubt about the role that Earth’s warming climate played in the storm and the devastation it left. It’s just physics: Warmer ocean waters make hurricanes grow in intensity and speed, and warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. It also didn’t help that when the storm reached North Carolina, the area had already been saturated by several days of heavy rainfall.
All told, the Southeast US was hit with somewhere around 40 trillion gallons of water in the space of a few days, the Associated Press reports. Drop much of that water in mountainous areas, and you get flash floods, landslides, inaccessible roads, billions of dollars in damage, and large sections of the region without electricity or clean water.
And with a bit more than a month until Election Day, of course, the response to the disaster becomes a political issue, made worse by one presidential candidate lying shamelessly and telling storm victims that the government is deliberately ignoring them, even as aid is being rushed to them. Yet another first in the gutter politics brought to us by Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden is set to visit North Carolina today, taking care not to get in the way of rescue and relief operations, and governors of the affected states have confirmed that the White House is indeed answering their calls and authorizing their requests for help. Some 3,600 federal personnel are already at work in the affected states, and Biden has promised, “I’m here to tell every single survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as it takes.”
While Trump has rushed into lying full speed about the federal response, his attempts to politicize the tragedy are also making people remember about his own very different handling of emergencies, like his deliberate slow-walking of aid to Puerto Rico — where they didn’t even vote for him! — after Hurricane Maria in 2017, or his constant threats to withhold aid following wildfires in California — a threat he even repeated this year while campaigning for president.
Oh, possibly even more apples-to-apples: After Hurricane Matthew hit North Carolina in 2017, then-President Donald Trump denied 99 percent — not a typo! — of the state’s emergency funding request.
Most of the politicking following Helene has focused on the immediate response, but lurking in the background of those discussions is the climate crisis itself, because outside the Republican Party, even people who aren’t climate nerds know in general that extreme weather events are one of the chief effects of climate change.
So far, climate hasn’t been a major issue in this election, although it did finally come up in the debate between Trump and Kamala Harris — and now, in the aftermath of Helene, it came up in last night’s vice presidential debate very early as opposed to in the waning minutes. (We’ll have a post on that later, but yes, even Republicans now have to admit there’s “weird weather” — just not that there’s anything we can do about it, shrug ho hum!) It’s hard to say whether climate will itself become a major electoral issue, though it certainly should be. There’s a pretty clear difference between the parties on climate, after all.
Over the weekend, while Helene was still tearing up the South, Trump himself brought up climate change — to mock it, at least. At a Saturday rally, Trump called it “one of the great scams of all time,” and complained again just yesterday about “the Green New Scam,” his blanket insult for the never-passed Green New Deal, but also any other efforts to address climate change. It was a lie he’s used before, claiming that Democrats wanted “93 trillion dollars” and that
“They wanted to rip down all the buildings in Manhattan, those gorgeous buildings with those big beautiful windows, and they wanted to rebuild them without windows, because without windows is more ‘energy efficient.’ […] This is what they want. These people are crazy.”
Trump has promised oil CEOs that he will roll back every bit of Biden’s actual climate legislation he can, as long as they donate $1 billion to his campaign; to be sure, he was already planning to do that anyway.
We’re not going to go into detail again on Harris and Walz’s positions on climate, which are sane and will build on the achievements she and Joe Biden have already made. While it won’t be enough for her to simply campaign on being Not Trump, we’ve already seen, in the two debates, that Harris will continue to emphasize the administration’s commitment to the clean energy transition, even as she points out that America is already energy independent thanks to record oil production — it’s that “all of the above” energy strategy that acknowledges we still run on oil even as we’re ramping up the clean energy economy that will replace fossil fuels. JD Vance lied about that for quite a while last night as well, and we’ll get to that too!
Expect Harris to continue framing the energy transition in terms of the economic boost it’s bringing to the US, as she did during the first debate:
I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president. We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world.
One thing’s for sure: One of our political parties knows climate change is real and that we need to build up clean energy as quickly as possible. The other one offers nothing but denial, delay, and the illusion that we can pollute our way to prosperity.
[CBS News / AP / Inside Climate News / Guardian / Heatmap]
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Floods aren't a gentle rise of water level in mountainous areas. They're juggernauts moving boulders along at 20 MPH. All the infrastructure follows river valleys; roads, communication lines, power, rail... Not to mention all the towns are in those valleys. My heart goes out to NC.
It's utterly insane that literally EVERY SINGLE THING Donald Trump says is something he himself has done and is projecting onto the other side. That block quote about tearing down historic Manhattan- that fucker did that! Was supposed to preserve art deco friezes for the Museum of History when he razed the Bonwit Teller building for his gold shitpalace, and instead, nah, just destroyed them instead. Our media is so failed. A decent journalist would be able to, every time Trump opens his mouth, point to the time(s) when he did exactly what he is accusing Democrats of.