The devastation caused by Hurricane Helena brought climate change at the forefront of the presidential campaign after the issue sat on the sidelines for months.
vice president Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday to see hard-hit areas, two days after her Republican opponent, former Pres. Donald Trumpwas in the state and criticized the federal response to the storm, which killed at least 180 people. Thousands of people in the Carolinas are still without running water, cellphones and electricity.
President Joe Biden toured some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter on Wednesday. Biden, who is often called upon to survey damage and comfort victims after tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters, traveled to the Carolinas to get a closer look at the hurricane’s devastation. He is expected to visit Georgia and Florida later this week.
“The storms are getting stronger and stronger,” Biden said after surveying the damage near Asheville, North Carolina. At least 70 people have died in the state.
“No one can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” Biden said at a briefing in Raleigh, the state capital. “They must be brain dead if they do.”
Meanwhile, Harris hugged and snuggled with family in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.
“There’s real pain and trauma caused by this hurricane” and its aftermath, Harris said in front of a storm-damaged house with downed trees in the yard.
“We’re here for the long haul,” she added.
The focus on the storm — and its connection to climate change — was notable after climate change was lightly mentioned in two presidential debates this year. Instead, the candidates focused on abortion rights, the economy, immigration and other issues.
The hurricane featured prominently in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, when Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Waltz were asked about the storm and the larger issue of climate change.
Both men called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed on the need for a strong federal response. But it was Waltz, the governor of Minnesota, who put the storm in the context of a warming climate.
“There’s no question that this thing burst onto the scene faster and louder than anything we’ve seen,” he said.
Bob Henson, a Yale Climate Connections meteorologist and writer, said it was no surprise that Helene was pushing both the federal disaster response and human-caused climate change into the campaign conversation.
“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in major elections,” he said. “Helene is a massive disaster affecting millions of Americans. And it coincides with several well-established links between hurricanes and climate change, including rapid intensification and increased rainfall.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain has drenched the Southeast in the past week, an amount that, if concentrated in North Carolina, would cover the state in 3 1/2 feet of water. “This is an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
During Tuesday’s debate, Walz credited Vance with previous statements acknowledging that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and joked that rising seas “will make more beach property available to invest in.”
Trump said in a speech on Tuesday that “the planet has actually gotten a little bit cooler recently,” adding, “Climate change is all over the place.”
In fact, the summer of 2024 was the hottest in Earth’s history, making this year likely to end up as the warmest ever recorded by mankind, according to the European Copernicus Climate Office. Global records were only broken last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from El Niño, continues to increase temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said.
Vance, the senator from Ohio, said he and Trump support clean air, clean water and “want the environment to be cleaner and safer.” However, during Trump’s four years in office, he has taken a series of actions to repeal more than 100 environmental regulations.
Vance sidestepped a question about whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that climate change is a hoax. “What the president said is that if the Democrats — specifically Kamala Harris and her leadership — really believed that climate change was serious, what they would do is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America . And they don’t do that,” he said.
“This idea that carbon (dioxide) emissions are the driver of all climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true just for the sake of argument. So we’re not arguing about weird science. If you believe that, what would you like to do?” asked Vance.
The answer, he said, is “to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we are the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
Vance argued that Biden and Harris’ policies actually help China because many solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other materials used in renewable energy and electric vehicles are made in China and imported into the United States.
Walz refuted that claim, noting that the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ landmark climate law passed in 2022, includes the largest investment in domestic clean energy production. The legislation, on which Harris cast the deciding vote, created 200,000 jobs across the country, including in Ohio and Minnesota, Walz said. Vance was not in the Senate when the bill was approved.
“We’re producing more natural gas and more oil (in the United States) than we’ve ever had,” Waltz said. “We’re also producing more clean energy.”
The comment echoed a remark Harris made during last month’s presidential debate. The Biden-Harris administration has seen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot rely too heavily on foreign oil,” Harris said at the time.
While Biden rarely mentions it, domestic production of fossil fuels under his administration is at an all-time high. Crude oil production averaged 12.9 million barrels per day last year, eclipsing a previous record set in 2019 under Trump, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Democrats want to continue investment in renewable energy like wind and solar — and not just because Green New Deal backers want it, Waltz said.
“My farmers know that climate change is real. They have seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods one after the other. But what they do is adapt,” he said.
“The solution for us is to keep moving forward (except that climate change is real) and reduce dependence on fossil fuels,” Walz said, adding that the administration is doing just that.
“We see ourselves becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just for the present,” he said.
