policy
The back-to-back catastrophic Helene and Milton attacks within the southeastern US are reshaping the presidential race and putting climate disasters at the middle of the ultimate stretch of the dueling campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
In interviews and speeches, on the campaign trail and on social media, Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Republican Trump are increasingly talking in regards to the same thing—hurricanes and disaster relief—and in very other ways.
For Helene, disasters were the main focus of the campaign because the storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region on September 26 as a Category 4 storm before dumping historic rainfall inland that triggered deadly flooding, particularly within the West North Carolina. In the wake of the storm, Harris and Trump adjusted their travel plans to go to affected communities and so they increasingly talked about recovery efforts.
The threat of Milton, one other powerful hurricane that hit Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday evening, only heightened candidates' attention to the difficulty.
Trump used the dual disasters to attack Harris and President Joe Biden over their response, spreading misinformation about it on his social media page Truth Social and in interviews and rally speeches. Trump falsely claimed that disaster relief funds can be diverted to migrants and that hurricane victims could only receive $750 in aid. He also claimed without evidence that the relief effort neglected Republican communities.
Meanwhile, Harris spends much of her time talking about hurricane preparedness, response and relief. The issue got here up when she appeared on ABC daytime talk show The View. She dismissed a few of Trump's baseless claims in regards to the government's post-Helene relief effort. She later called the Weather Channel to counter further misinformation about hurricanes. (Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told Bloomberg News: “The only misinformation is coming from the Harris-Biden administration.”)
The Harris campaign also released a brand new ad attacking Trump's handling of past disasters during his time as president. It highlights the map of the trail of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, which Trump famously altered with a Sharpie – a saga that became often called Sharpiegate. The ad features interviews with two former Trump officials highlighting his response to the storm. “He would propose not to provide disaster relief to states that did not vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, the lead attorney for former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, says within the ad.
Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that climate change is increasing the strength of hurricanes, making them intensify more quickly and bringing more rain.
Harris didn’t address the connection between the storms and global warming. And so far, she has not made climate a cornerstone of her campaign, although the Biden administration has left a major climate legacy and plenty of Democrats say global warming is amongst their top election priorities. She only touched on the difficulty briefly in her speech to the Democratic National Convention. In the talk with Trump, she briefly mentioned Biden's green initiatives before touting U.S. oil and gas production. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” up to now, has vowed to gut Biden's climate policies while disparaging clean energy technologies corresponding to wind power and electric vehicles.
Both candidates are actually talking about climate change, even in the event that they don't use those words, says Pete Maysmith, senior vp of campaigns on the LCV Action Fund, the election-related site of the League of Conservation Voters.
“I think sometimes there's a view that we need these magic words or we're not talking about climate change,” Maysmith says. “Of course we're talking about climate change.” (Similarly, he argues that Harris has already talked about it in her comments on wind energy, solar energy, automotive batteries and more.)
Environmental groups have followed the Harris campaign's lead on find out how to raise the difficulty of climate with voters by focusing their ad buys and other voter education efforts on how federal climate spending creates recent jobs and usually lowers energy costs, reasonably than to present the political details intimately. And now they're following suit and making hurricane news.
The LCV Action Fund recently posted a brief video on Instagram showing images and pictures of Helene's damage, with a voiceover from Trump saying: “When people speak about global warming, I say that the ocean inside will decrease by 100ths of an inch over the subsequent 400 years. This will not be our problem.” (Trump has made versions of this claim in campaign rallies and tv interviews.) The video has been viewed greater than 4 million times, partially because American musician Billie Eilish reposted it.
The advocacy group Climate Power released a video Thursday with rapper Big Freedia highlighting how Project 2025 — a conservative wish list for a second Trump presidency that Trump himself has rejected — proposes privatizing the National Weather Service, which raises warnings issues that Americans proceed to depend on to maintain Helene and Milton protected.
“The indisputable fact that Hurricane Milton became such a strong storm in such a brief time period shows that the climate crisis is here and shows through a really clear lens the fee to people – in lost lives, in lost homes, within the lack of…”corporations,” says Alex Glass, communications director at Climate Power.
image credit : www.boston.com