When Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm last week, it ravaged the Southeast. The official death toll has surpassed 200, and many victims are still missing. Active-duty soldiers are descending across the region to disperse essential supplies, as residents grapple with billions of dollars in damages. The images emerging from the disaster, the flooded streets, collapsed homes, and debris stretching as far as the eye can see, are hard to bear.
What’s also hard to bear is certain politicians’ refusal to come to terms with a key driver of this disaster: climate change. Such was the case with Ohio Sen. JD Vance in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate when he and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz were asked to comment on the harrowing fallout of Hurricane Helene and Americans’ overwhelming desire for meaningful climate action.
“I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water,” Vance meandered. “We want the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions. This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science.”
A nationally representative study of registered American voters found that 69% trust their primary care doctor for climate change information, with 57% of conservative Republicans among them.
But Hurricane Helene itself is a grim reminder that the science, as “weird” as some may find it, cannot be ignored. What was striking about Vance’s circuitous response is how he surgically bifurcated Hurricane Helene from climate change, addressing the two topics as if they’re as distinct as apples and oranges. He also employed a strategic "if-then" construct, proposing what should happen if people believe that anthropogenic emissions drive climate change, but not personally accepting the premise as fact.
This muddled nonanswer comes on the heels of sobering findings about just how deeply the climate crisis and Hurricane Helene are connected. Early research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory indicates that climate change may have increased the rainfall from Hurricane Helene by up to 50% in some locations. Other estimates suggest that climate change was a likely culprit for the storm’s rapid intensification, as its winds became increasingly ferocious. These findings mirror wider trends. With sea surface temperatures ramping up, stronger storms are in store.
This most recent storm also opens a critical window for Vice President Kamala Harris to step in where Vance and Trump have so egregiously fumbled: In the month remaining before Election Day, Harris should lean into communications that underscore the public health threats arising from climate change. Not only are these threats acutely evident in the wake of Hurricane Helene, but this framing could also stir bipartisan coalescence around actually addressing the climate crisis.
A nationally representative study of registered American voters found that 69% trust their primary care doctor for climate change information, with 57% of conservative Republicans among them. In fact, conservative Republicans are more likely to trust the American Medical Association as a source on climate change than the Environmental Protection Agency.
Reconstituting climate change discourse as a matter of public health and safety taps into mutually aligned priorities. It serves as a powerful reminder that climate change is no back burner issue, but is already intertwined with voters’ central concerns about their communities.
Vance’s tap dance around this issue may align with his own political calculus, but it’ll ultimately prove to be a misguided approach. As debate moderator Norah O’Donnell pointed out while posing the climate change question, a majority of young Republicans want to see climate solutions, too.
Public Health Emergency declarations were swiftly issued for the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida, as the profound health effects of the disaster began to manifest. While fatalities stand out as the most visible consequence and tend to be documented more consistently, the true public health toll runs far deeper.
The almost 100,000 residents of Asheville, North Carolina, could face weeks without clean water, heightening the risk of waterborne disease transmission. As of Thursday, power was still unavailable for almost 1 million customers across the Southeast. For people who need to refrigerate medications or use medical devices, a power outage can be deadly.
And this is to say nothing of how local health care systems become strained to their breaking points, of how hospitalization rates for substance use disorders rise, or of how post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health impacts linger well after the debris is cleared.
These are not mythical scenarios of a doomsday future. This is the present plight of life in a climate emergency.
Hurricane Helene has been the most devastating wake-up call about climate change in recent years. Vance, and Trump, demonstrate over and over that they deeply misunderstand how Americans tangibly, viscerally, feel climate impacts in a way that is gradually transcending party lines. Harris must not miss this critical moment to emerge as the unifying messenger we so urgently need.