In the last two years the U.S. has suffered from record hurricanes, rainfall, floods, wildfires and other disasters made worse by rising temperatures and sea levels. These extreme events, exacerbated by climate change, have cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Now,as election day looms, the gross mishandling of these disasters is likely to exact a high political price on Donald Trump and other climate change-denying Republicans, helping to create a political blue wave that will swell Democratic numbers to a House majority, Florida’s Governorship, and other key prizes in the mid-terms.
There is political precedent for this. Recent history shows voters punish poor Presidential responses to natural disasters, and that such poor responses have a role in changing the public perception regarding the competence and characters of the ruling party.
The classic case in point is President George W. Bush’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That storm devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and costing $125 billion. Bush’s notorious obliviousness was personified at the outset of the disaster when he commended his appointee, the demonstrably unqualified Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, with the infamous remark– “Brownee, you’re doing a heck of a job” –at precisely the moment New Orleans had descended into chaos and Brown was clueless.
Emails from Brown at the time show he had little understanding of the urgency after Katrina. While hundreds were dying without food or water he asked a desperate FEMA employee in New Orleans if he needed to “tweak” his response, and the morning after the hurricane asked another employee “can I quit now?” Bush’s poll numbers plummeted in the wake of Katrina, never to fully recover.
The callous, incompetent response by the Bush Administration to Hurricane Katrina fit into a larger narrative that Bush and the Republicans were out of touch with the concerns of average Americans, and willing to put them in harm’s way, as typified by the Iraq War, the major issue of the 2006 campaign. In the subsequent 2006 election, Democrats took back the House for the first time in 12 years, the last time the House switched back to the Democratic control.
If anything, Trump’s responses to five record-breaking major hurricanes to hit the U.S. in the last 14 months has been even more cavalier, cold and condescending than Bush’s in 2005. Unbelievably, Trump directly lied about the deaths of thousands of American citizens, ignoring fact-filled studies showing that thousands died in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria last year due to losses of electricity, among other problems, at hospitals and elsewhere.
The Trump Administration has been widely blamed for ignoring the scope of the disaster because of the island’s lack of political muscle, not rushing needed supplies and personnel to Puerto Rico, with much of the island lacking electricity for months after the storm and overall recovery painfully slow. Tens of thousands of citizens were forced to move to the US mainland, primarily Florida. When Trump did quickly stop in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Maria, he turned his public appearance into a farce, grotesquely pantomiming his attitude toward victims by show-boating, flipping rolls of paper towels to citizens as if shooting basketball free throws.
After Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history, which occurred just prior to Maria, Trump entirely fabricated the strange assertion that some Texans had been reckless and seemed to deserve to be victims, claiming that “people went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn’t work out too well.”
The Houston Chronicle said in a news story that law enforcement and first responders were baffled by Trump’s boating claim which nobody could explain. Instead, Harris County, Texas sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, credited civilians with making an "extraordinary effort" with their own boats to rescue neighbors in their neighborhoods, as Hurricane Harvey flooded the Texas coast with 52 inches of rain and turned the streets into rivers.
Remarkably, for several minutes during at a rally soon after Hurricanes Florence and Michael, which he did not otherwise address, Trump’s narcissism reached a new low when he asserted that the storms proved his hair was real: “they used to say 'he wears a hairpiece…they don't say that anymore. You walk around in those conditions, you can't fake it...So that's one good thing."
Peer-reviewed studies have found that as much as 40% or 20 inches of Harvey’s record rain was due to much warmer Gulf of Mexico temperatures due to climate change. Similar analysis has found that other recent hurricanes were also made more destructive because of underlying climate change. The reason is that Gulf, Caribbean and Atlantic water temperatures are now two to four degrees Fahrenheit higher than in 1950. And for every degree of water temperature increase, there is at least a 4% increase in atmospheric moisture that makes storms larger and more intense.
And it’s not just hurricanes and extreme storms. Climate change is acting as a force multiplier for wildfires, heat waves, sea-level rise, infectious disease, and other impacts that injure public safety, killing Americans and hugely increasing federal budget costs. Today more than half of the entire US Forest Service budget is burned up just fighting wildfires; in 1990 fires consumed only 15% of USFS costs. Leading researchers find that climate change is a key reason US wildfires now burn twice the forest area they did in 1984.
Trump’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finds that “cumulative cost of [just] the 16 separate billion-dollar weather events in the U.S. in 2017 was $306.2 billion, breaking the previous cost record of $214.8 billion (2005).” The cost to taxpayers is enormous, with more than $130 billion in emergency federal funding spent on 2017 events alone.
Polls show that Americans are growing tired of this deceit regarding climate change and its impacts. A clear majority of 55% believes the peer-reviewed science that climate change increased the intensity of hurricanes this season. Importantly, that represents a large increase from 2005, when only 39 percent believed there was a link, suggesting Trump and the Republicans are in for even more blame for hurricanes than Bush and that climate change is a key context.
Moreover, as a recent Yale poll has found, even as Trump purposely undermines every climate policy protection he can, “most Americans support diverse policies to reduce global warming. For example, 85% of Americans support funding more research into renewable energy, 77% support regulating CO2 as a pollutant, 70% support setting strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired power plants, and 68% support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax.”
Swing-state Democrats are stepping into the leadership void. Just this week North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper pledged to cut that state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% citing recent hurricanes and the need to protect the people of his state as a key reason.
In the key swing state of Florida, voters have had enough of climate denial under Gov. Rick Scott, and the sea-level rise and storms harming their communities and economy. They are turning to candidates like Democratic nominee for Governor, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who leads in the latest polls, and who emphasizes the role of climate chance science in protecting Florida’s citizens and turning the Sunshine State into a world leader on solar energy, unlike his Republican opponent.
Indeed, evidence suggests serious policy reactions to disasters made worse by climate change can boost the political fortunes of competent candidates. That lesson was demonstrated when Super Storm Sandy hit New Jersey and New York just weeks before the 2012 election, and Barack Obama went out of his way to demonstrate not only prompt disaster relief but true long-term leadership by making climate protection a key goal of his second term. Mitt Romney, who had famously mocked efforts “to hold back the oceans” in his nomination speech, seemed out of his depth.
Of course, many other issues will play a major role in the likely blue wave next week, from health care to Trump’s denigration of women and immigrants to his poisonous political discourse that puts hatred above leadership to the Republican tax cuts and massively growing debt. But the callous, short-sighted, incompetent and nihilistic treatment of these heat-fueled hurricanes and other disasters by Trump and other Republicans shows them to be out of touch with protecting public safety and the economic interests of the American people.
In fact, climate change denial by Trump and other Republicans is a major proof point in the key 2018 campaign narrative about Republican Party leaders: that they are narcissistic, caring only about their own narrow political self-interest, and are willing to lie repeatedly and even put the American people in harm’s way if they think it will help them win. But this time, those tactics appear likely to create a new blue wave of Democratic wins.
