Author: Matthew Daly
WASHINGTON (AP) — The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene has thrust climate change to the forefront of the presidential campaign after months of relegating the issue to the sidelines.
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday to tour hard-hit areas, two days after her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, came to the state to criticize the federal response to the storm that killed at least 180 people. reaction. Thousands of people in the Carolinas still lack running water, cell phone service and electricity.
President Joe Biden visited some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter on Wednesday. Biden, who is often called upon to survey damage and console victims after tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters, traveled to the Carolinas to take a closer look at the devastation caused by hurricanes. He is expected to visit Georgia and Florida later this week.
“The storm is getting stronger,” Biden said after surveying 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 told a news conference in the state capital of Raleigh. “They must be brain dead if they did that.”
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Meanwhile, Harris hugged and huddled with a family in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.
“There's real pain and trauma caused by this hurricane” and its aftermath, Harris said outside a storm-damaged house where trees fell in the yard.
“We are here for the long term,” she added.
The focus on the storm and its connection to climate change is notable after only minor mentions of climate change in two presidential debates this year. Candidates instead focused on abortion rights, the economy, immigration and other issues.
The hurricane figured prominently in Tuesday's vice presidential debate, with Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz being asked about the storm and the larger issue of climate change.
Both called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed a strong federal response was needed. But Minnesota Governor Walz put the storm in the context of a warming climate.
“There's no question that this thing is coming out faster and stronger than anything we've ever seen,” he said.
Bob Hansen, a meteorologist and author at Yale University Climate Connection, said it’s not surprising that Helen would include federal disaster response and human-made climate change in the campaign conversation.
“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in major elections,” he said. “Helen was a disaster of massive proportions, affecting millions of Americans. It coincided with several clear links between hurricanes and climate change, including the rapid intensification of hurricanes and the intensification of heavy rains.
The Southeast received more than 40 megagallons of rain last week, which if concentrated in North Carolina, would flood the state with 3 1/2 feet of water. “This is an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
During Tuesday's debate, Walz praised Vance's past statements acknowledging that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and joked that rising sea levels “will make more oceanfront properties available for investment.”
“The Earth has actually gotten a little cooler recently,” Trump said in a speech on Tuesday, adding: “Climate change encompasses everything.”
In fact, the sweltering summer of 2024 reached the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth, making this year likely to be the warmest ever measured by humans, according to European climate service Copernicus. Just last year, global records were broken as temperatures and extreme weather continued to rise due to human-caused climate change, temporarily boosted by the El Niño phenomenon, scientists say.
Ohio Senator Vance said he and Trump support clean air, clean water and “want the environment to become cleaner and safer.” However, during his four years in office, Trump took a series of actions and repealed more than 100 environmental regulations.
Vance sidestepped a question about whether he agreed with Trump's assertion that climate change is a hoax. “What the president is saying is that if Democrats — especially Kamala Harris and her leadership — really believed climate change was serious, what they would do is increase manufacturing and energy production in the United States. But that's not what they're doing,” he said.
“This idea that carbon dioxide emissions cause all climate change. Well, for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s true. So we’re not arguing about weird science. If you believe that, what do you want to do? Si asked.
The answer, he said, is “to produce as much energy as possible in the United States because we are the cleanest economy in the world.”
Vance claimed that Biden and Harris' policies actually help China because many of the solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other materials used in renewable energy and electric vehicles are manufactured in China and imported into the United States.
Walz disputed that assertion, noting that the landmark climate law approved by Democrats in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, includes the largest-ever investment in domestic clean energy production. Walz said the law, on which Harris cast the deciding vote, has created 200,000 jobs across the country, including in Ohio and Minnesota. 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 ever before,” Walz said. “We also produce more clean energy.”
The comment echoed remarks Harris made during last month's presidential debate. Harris said at the time that the Biden-Harris administration had achieved “the largest growth in domestic oil production in history because we realized we cannot be overly reliant on foreign oil.”
Although Biden rarely mentions it, domestic fossil fuel production is at an all-time high under his watch. Crude oil production averaged 12.9 million barrels per day last year, surpassing the record set in 2019 under Trump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Democrats want to continue investing in renewable energy sources like wind and solar, Walz said, and not just because Green New Deal proponents want that.
“My farmers know climate change is real. They've had 500 years of drought and 500 years of floods. But what they're doing is adapting,” he said.
“Our solution is to move forward, (accept) that climate change is real” and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Walz said, adding that the government was doing just that.
“We see ourselves becoming an energy superpower in the future, not just in 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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