Hurricane Helene makes climate change a major issue in the presidential campaign

WASHINGTON – The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene has brought climate change to the forefront of the presidential campaign after the issue remained on the sidelines for months.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday to see the hardest-hit areas, two days after her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, was in the state and criticized the federal response to the storm that killed at least 200 people in the southeast. Helene is the deadliest storm to hit the US continent since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

On Wednesday and Thursday, President Biden visited some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter. Biden, who was frequently called upon to survey damage and comfort victims of tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters, traveled to the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia to take a closer look at the hurricane’s devastation.

“The storms are getting stronger,” Biden said Wednesday after surveying the damage near Asheville, North Carolina. At least 70 people have died in the state.

“No one can deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore,” Biden said at a briefing in Raleigh. “If this happens, they must be brain dead.”

Meanwhile, Harris hugged and cuddled with family on Wednesday in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.

“The hurricane and its aftermath caused real pain and trauma,” Harris said outside a house damaged by the storm and with downed trees in the yard.

“We are here for the long haul,” she added.

The focus on the storm — and its connection to climate change — was notable after climate change was mentioned in just 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, where Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were asked about the storm and the broader issue of climate change.

Both men called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed on the need for a strong federal response. But it was Walz, Minnesota’s governor, who put the storm in the context of a warming climate.

“There is no doubt that this thing came roaring onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we had ever seen,” he said.

Bob Henson, a meteorologist and writer at Yale Climate Connections, said it’s not surprising that Helene is including both the federal response to natural disasters and man-made climate change in campaign conversations.

“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in important elections,” he said. “Helene is a widespread disaster that affects millions of Americans. This fits into several well-established links between hurricanes and climate change, including rapid intensification and intense downpours.”

More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast last week, an amount that, if concentrated in North Carolina, would cover the state with 3 1/2 feet of water. “It’s an astronomical amount of rainfall,” 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 in which he acknowledged that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and joked that rising sea levels “will create more beachfront properties to invest in.”

Trump said in Tuesday’s speech that “the planet has actually gotten a little bit colder lately,” adding, “Climate change is everything.”

According to the European climate service Copernicus, the summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, which means this year will likely be the warmest in human history. Global records were broken just last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from El Niño, continues to increase temperatures and extreme weather, scientists say.

Vance, the Ohio senator, said he and Trump support clean air and clean water and “want to make the environment cleaner and safer.” However, during his four years in office, Trump has taken a series of actions to repeal more than 100 environmental regulations.

Vance dodged a question about whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that climate change is a hoax. “The president said that if Democrats – particularly Kamala Harris and her leadership – really believed that climate change was serious, what they would do is increase production and increase energy production in the United States of America. And that’s not what they do,” he said.

“The view that carbon (dioxide) emissions are driving all climate change. Well, let’s say it’s true, for the sake of argument. So we’re not arguing about weird science. If you believe that, what would you like to do?” he 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 manufactured in China and imported to the United States.

Walz rejected that claim, noting that the Democrats’ signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act approved in 2022, includes the largest-ever investment in domestic clean energy production. Walz said the bill, for which Harris cast the deciding vote, created 200,000 jobs across the country, including in Ohio and Minnesota. Vance was not in the Senate when the bill passed.

“We are producing more natural gas and more oil (in the United States) than ever before,” Walz said. “We are also producing more clean energy.”

The comment echoed Harris’ remark from last month’s presidential debate. The Biden-Harris administration has overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot be overly reliant on foreign oil,” Harris said at the time.

Although Biden rarely mentions it, domestic fossil fuel production under his administration is at an all-time high. Oil production last year averaged 12.9 million barrels per day, beating the previous record set under Trump in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Democrats want to continue investing in renewable energy like wind and solar power — and not just because supporters of the Green New Deal want it, Walz said.

“My farmers know that climate change is real. They saw 500-year droughts and 500-year floods, one after the other. But they are adapting,” he said.

“For us, the solution is to continue to move forward, (accept) the fact that climate change is real” and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, Walz said, adding that the administration is doing exactly that.

“We see ourselves becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just for the present,” he said.

Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Christopher Megerian in Augusta, Georgia, contributed to this report.

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