Winds of Denial
Politics in the face of relentless hurricanes
After making landfall in Florida on the night of September 26th, Hurricane Helene left a wake of destruction through the southeast US. Over 220 people are confirmed dead so far, making Helene the fourth-deadliest storm to hit the US in the last 80 years. Entire towns have been washed away, and many places in North Carolina and Tennessee are not accessible by land because bridges and roads have been destroyed. Millions of people lost power for days (around 200,000 across Georgia and the Carolinas still do not have it). Residents of Asheville, NC, a city often touted as a climate haven, faced severe flooding and may not have running water for weeks. It will probably be awhile before the extent of the damage can be accurately assessed, but initial estimates are as high as $110 billion.
Hurricane Helene is indeed a disaster, but it is anything but natural. Like other such events, the harm caused—the death and destruction and abandonment—are the result of countless contingencies and political choices. Like everything else in our society, the damage plays out along existing lines of social inequality, where the poorest and most marginalized are more likely to lose everything while wealth and power allow for a degree of mobility and insulation.
At an Impact Plastics factory in east Tennessee, workers were reportedly forced to stay on the job as conditions worsened and floodwaters approached. Once the power went out and they were sent home, it was too late. Eleven people were swept away by the flood. Five were rescued, four are confirmed dead, and two are still unaccounted for.
There is a notion sometimes espoused by people across the entire political spectrum that the US will mostly be spared by the climate crisis. This can be a comforting and useful story, but it is not true, even if many of the countries least responsible will be hit harder. We are already seeing more severe hurricanes, wildfires, and heatwaves at 1.3ºC of warming, and this will only get worse as long as fossil fuels continue to be burned. A study published last week found that the average long-term deaths caused by US hurricanes are in the 7,000-11,000 range as the devastating secondary and tertiary effects ripple through communities for years.
We live in complex webs of ecological and economic interdependency. And a disaster in one place might not directly and immediately harm you, but you might feel its effects many miles away because of our globalized society. Hurricane Helene hit the small town of Spruce Pines, NC, which produces almost all of the world’s high-purity quartz, a vital component in semiconductors, solar panels, and other high-tech machinery. The mining operation only sustained minor damage, but it still lacks electricity and nearby transportation infrastructure may be significantly affected. It remains to be seen if this will have any noticeable upstream effects.
This is a new climatic era, where the unprecedented, the once-in-a-millenium, have and will become more and more normal. Every decision to perpetuate the fossil fuel system or clear-cut a rainforest makes a contribution. But that is only part of the story; a number of political and ecological bills are coming due.
In North Carolina, the Republican Party oversaw a regime of lax building rules, allowing for construction on place where it should not occur like steep slopes, floodplains, and wetlands, rejecting proposed limits. Of course, this is at the behest of the construction industry, which wants to build things for the lowest cost possible in order to maximize their profits. This is more the norm than not throughout the US, where development is permitted to drain and pave over natural water and carbon sinks and build in the areas at highest risk of wildfires and flooding.
Our insurance system is clearly not up to the task of mitigating these risks. Less than 1% of inland homes hit by Helene had flood insurance. Private insurers are increasingly pulling out of many high-risk areas, but without a managed retreat this often leaves the working class in the dust. We need to socialize the costs and benefits while simultaneously planning a comprehensive transition towards more just and ecologically sustainable land use. This would allow for a collective freedom decidedly at odds with the twisted conservative version where wealth makes health and might makes right that helped get us here.
Many people are predicting that the increasingly clear and destabilizing ecological breakdown will cause the US Right to soon turn from outright climate denial to “ecofascism,” using the crisis as an excuse to further militarize borders and hoard resources. But they are already espousing and enacting these evil policies, and they are not invoking climate change—and I do not think the conservative powers-that-be will anytime soon. There is little “eco” to be found in the increasingly fascist GOP, a party structurally enmeshed with oil barons, car dealership owners, and the corporate freedom to pollute with impunity.
Not satisfied with despoiling the air, water, and soil, they are increasingly polluting the information ecosystem, a trend that accelerated during the height of the pandemic. In the wake of Helene, a network of far-right influencers, politicians, and media figures have sown chaos with a firehose of terrible lies and misinformation. Donald Trump has claimed that the Biden administration diverted disaster relief funding to illegal immigrants. Images made by generative “AI” programs are being viewed by millions of people, shared as ostensible photographic evidence of the lack of Biden administration disaster response.
US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said “they can control the weather” on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Twitter used to be a key information source during disasters, but now it is a key source of misinformation. Not only is its search function useless as it fills with bots and spam, owner Elon Musk has used the site he ran into the ground to spread lies about FEMA, causing their workers to receive death threats on the platform. FEMA has a long history as a favored subject of conspiracy theories, which have now crawled out of the darkest corners of the internet and into the shameless and addled brains of some of the most powerful people in the world.
It has gotten so bad that North Carolina politicians from both parties have had to denounce the lies, and FEMA added a rumor debunking page to their website. No, the government did not create Hurricane Helene in order to remove the residents of North Carolina so they could access the state’s lithium reserves.
Republicans might outright deny climate change, or the human contribution to it, or the government response to its effects, or any number of other aspects of reality, but the Democratic Party has its own forms of denial. Vice President Kamala Harris, like Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama before her, has on the campaign trail been simultaneously espousing the necessity of climate action while also touting record domestic oil and gas production. Even the ostensible climate action is in and of itself a decidedly mixed bag, mostly based on incentives for renewable energy and electric vehicle consumption and production.
The Biden-Harris administration is also embracing harsher immigration policy and rhetoric and a new cold war with China while supplying the bombs and political support for a genocide in Gaza. During her Democratic National Convention speech, Harris said, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Even beyond the direct death and destruction in the present, it is easy to see how these extrapolate into a horrifying future when climatalogical and ecological conditions worsen.
There is not really an alternative agenda of global cooperation or valuing life instead of profit on offer. This is denial in a more abstract sense than the angry, childish conservative version. Denial that the business-as-usual of capitalism and imperialism can continue if this is a crisis you actually want to solve, and denial that the powerful have the means and responsibility to take requisite action. Carbon reductionist tax credits for 9,000 lb electric Hummers and massive “climate-smart” factory farms are certainly not it. Neither are sanctions and bombs on the Global South. Fracking every last drop of fossil fuels with hardened borders and a globe-spanning, ecocidal military-industrial complex is a politics of death and violence that will collapse on itself no matter how many solar panels you manufacture and install in the US.
This is not a vision for caring for and repairing the biosphere, which each day becomes more urgent than ever. In a journal article published today, a group of climate scientists bluntly stated,
We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.
Also today, Hurricane Milton is quickly gathering steam in the Gulf of Mexico and was recently upgraded to a Category 5, the highest designation for hurricane wind speed. Meteorologist Noah Bergen said, “This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.” Large swaths of Florida—many of which were just battered by Hurricane Helene—are in mandatory or encouraged evacuation zones, with Milton poised to make landfall in the Tampa area within the next day or so.
Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that removed all mentions of “climate change” from state statutes. During his failed campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination last year, DeSantis said he has “always rejected the politization of the weather.” Any politics that hopes to truly tackle the accelerating global crises of fascism and climate change will have to explicitly and intentionally reject this obfuscation—and act accordingly.
I appreciate your clear articulation of the political x climate situation and the emergency we are in, Matthew. I always look forward to reading and rereading your writing, and look forward to your next post.