If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. --Joe Ettor (IWW labor organizer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IASdERt3-m0
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Hurricane Helene: The Reality of Global Warming and Resultant Climate Change Becomes Ever More Obvious
Introduction by dmorista: The Hurricane Season had been pretty quiet and then Hurricane Helene came ashore. Those of us who are concerned about the consequences of continuing to emit huge amounts of Green House Gases into the atmosphere. The thinking used to be that Global Warming and its associated Climate Change effects would hit the Earth Hard in the second half of this Century. Instead the sorts of disasters and events have been affecting various parts of the Earth NOW!! Asheville, North Carolina was widely regarded to be a “Climate Refuge Area” where people could go to escape the ravages increasingly being felt in places like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. Now we have seen a huge rain event, as the Hurricane moved inland and while its winds did calm down, immense amounts of rain fell.
The 5 articles and one video here all discuss the increasing effects of Natural Disasters from a variety of points of view. Item 4)., “In the Wake of Hurricane Helene, ….”, points out that the Trump Administration took actions to reduce the response to natural disasters, actions that were reversed by the Biden/Harris administration. Furthermore the article points out that Project 2025 has a hit list of climate mitigation and disaster response measures that a second Trump Regime would target, these include:
“Project 2025 outlines several actions that would reduce or remove essential disaster relief, planning and recovery efforts. For example, it proposes:
“To end direct lending under the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program—the federal government’s largest source of disaster recovery funds for survivors—including small-business owners and households who need to repair and rebuild their properties
“That FEMA increase the threshold for disaster declarations, thereby making it more difficult for states and localities to qualify for federal aid after disaster strikes, limiting critical assistance for local families and businesses
“Winding down the National Flood Insurance Program—calling for it to be replaced by private insurance—despite limited private market alternatives for flood insurance, which would risk financial instability or ruin for owners of 4 million properties in the case of flood damage
“Commercializing the National Weather Service, potentially making things such as extreme weather forecasts developed by the NOAA available only to those who can pay”
The right-wing of the U.S. ruling class wants to frustrate any common response to this growing menace. They believe they can hide out in their mountain and southern hemisphere hideouts, fortified estates, yachts sailing the seas, and well supplied penthouses (with helicopter pads for quick exits if necessary). We, of course, would be expected to be loyal servants and ground crew, waving goodbye to them as they helicopter off to their New Zealand coastal hideouts.
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Why Hurricane Helene Could Finally Change the Conversation Around Climate Change - Inside Climate News
The massive personal and economic toll of unexpected inland flooding may represent a turning point.
Interview by Steve Curwood, Living on Earth
A member of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force searches a flood-damaged property in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on Friday in Asheville, N.C. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Abrahm Lustgarten, author of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.”
It may be weeks, months or even years before we fully understand the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Helene.
While still over water, Helene first flattened many shoreside communities along the Gulf Coast of Florida before it ripped ashore in North Florida and rampaged through five more states, leaving many in its path without working roads, power, food, and water.
Helene’s huge size and speed are linked to increasingly hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, and a stark reminder that with global heating, weather forecasts based on history are becoming poorer guides to present dangers. Hurricanes have usually weakened when they make landfall, but to the surprise of many, Helene’s impact was just as devastating in the inland mountains of western North Carolina as on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season.
Gargantuan amounts of moisture drenched hills and valleys of the region with water that had nowhere to go but down into homes, businesses, roads and bridges along the swollen rivers and streams. The death toll is nearing 200, with many others still missing, and the final numbers could be much higher.
STEVE CURWOOD: What role does climate denialism play in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Helene? To what extent can communities continue to turn a blind eye here?
ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: This is a difficult question for me to answer. Politically, climate denialism will make it difficult for certain people in certain places to have a forthright conversation about what has just happened to their towns, to their homes, to their cities, and that’s going to make a policy response or a decision about what kind of government response people expect difficult to arrive at.
Abrahm Lustgarten, journalist and author
On the other hand, my experience socially in talking to a lot of people through the course of my reporting is that there is an undeniable sense and a real consensus among all types of different political views that the environment around them is rapidly changing, and that is changing in disruptive ways. And I hear this in all sorts of ways.
I hear from conservative homeowners on the coast of Florida that they were just surprised to see a flood coming again year after year, that they remember hurricanes from years past. And hurricanes are a normal part of living on the Gulf Coast, but they don’t remember them being so destructive and so frequent. That might not be a person who is politically supportive of the idea of climate change, but that is an acknowledgement of what we all see happening around us, which is that the present doesn’t feel like it’s matching the patterns of the past, and that environmental change is something that people are concerned about. There’s a certain consensus—and Helene and the records that it is shattering will contribute to a hardening of that consensus—that we live in a new era.
CURWOOD: We don’t really know in dollar terms what the economic impact of Helene will prove to be. Those measurements will be taken in the years ahead. But the insurance risk is $150 billion; a lot of people lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods, are out of work, are seeing the ability to sell their homes really decline. To what extent is the climate emergency a threat to our entire economy?
LUSTGARTEN: It’s a huge threat to our entire economy.
The research alone has already predicted long before this storm that climate pressures will create a drag on the national economy: 1.2 percent of GDP annually per one degree Celsius of warming is the estimate that’s in published, peer-reviewed papers.
Those estimates increase dramatically for the most vulnerable parts of the country, so parts of the Gulf Coast Florida—the counties that are closest to hurricane risk, for example—they’re projected to see economic drags of up to 60 percent of their local GDP. There’s already a baked-in assumption that the effects of climate change are going to make it harder and harder to have a vibrant and thriving economy.
Part of what we’re seeing when we talk about the costs of a disaster like Helene is, what does it cost to rebuild and to make those people who were directly affected whole? What does it cost the federal government? What does it cost the National Flood Insurance Program? What do we choose to invest in it, in terms of not only aid to help people recover, but all of the infrastructure investments and policy changes that come afterwards?
It will be very expensive to try to build back these communities and to try to make them more sustainable and stronger in the future. And then what happens if and when we see another disaster that overlaps with this one, which is increasingly likely with climate change, so that basically, the costs of this one are not fully repaid before we have to start to pay the similar costs of the next one?
That’s the kind of snowballing effect that can start to seem really scary to the economists that I talk to.
CURWOOD: What about the social and emotional costs here? I know you’re not a psychologist, you’re not a social psychologist, but you talked to many people in preparing your book about the uprooting of America. What do you hear are the social and emotional costs of disasters like this?
LUSTGARTEN: First of all, my heart goes out to people who are impacted by this storm. The kind of destruction that we’ve all been looking at in newsreels is absolutely heartbreaking. Talking to people who are affected in that way, obviously every person is different, and there’s a spectrum of reactions.
Some people will be immediately dislodged from their lives by an experience like this, and they will move or make dramatic changes. Many other people will be resilient to a degree, and this is probably much more common. In the course of my reporting on migration, it takes many, many small impacts or incidents like this to add up to a decision to move or to migrate.
If you look at a storm like Helene in that context, then I would think we have a gradation of its psychological impacts on people. There are people on the Gulf Coast, who are in parts of Florida for whom this is the fifth disaster or the 10th disaster that they lived through. Some of them I’ve seen interviewed had just finished putting up the sheetrock on the repairs from what happened last year. Those people are very vulnerable and closer on the spectrum to giving in to that relentless drumbeat of bad news and risk than somebody in Asheville, North Carolina, for whom this storm was a surprise, for whom maybe they hadn’t experienced an event like this before.
I’m sure that it shakes everybody to their core. But on the spectrum of what makes somebody actually move, there’s a gradation depending on how many times this has happened to you.
CURWOOD: We have storms now that are traveling much farther inland than we expected. They’re wetter, slower, more destructive. From your perspective and what people have told you, what’s to be done?
LUSTGARTEN: We are in an era where we have to anticipate the unexpected and we have to understand the limits of what we can know. If you want to translate that uncertainty to hard plans, those plans might look like living and developing a community around a worst-case scenario instead of a fingers-crossed scenario.
I don’t know the community of Asheville very well, but I imagine that that might mean developing beyond the furthest reaches of the floodplain for the worst-case scenario, or imagining that every storm could potentially have the kind of unexpected impacts that we saw in this storm. And that’s really a reversal from how we’ve lived in the past, where we trust the data of history to inform the data of the future.
What it means to be in an era of discontinuity is that you can’t trust that data anymore, and so you have to guess about how bad it could be. And if we can wrap our minds around a guess, a physical planning paradigm that imagines the worst case, then we can keep ourselves kind of beyond the boundaries of that worst case, at least a little bit more reliably.
CURWOOD: Preparing for that worst case costs a lot of money—and people think that is a waste of money.
LUSTGARTEN: I talk about this a lot, and it’s one of the more depressing elements of the climate adaptation story for the United States: The costs of adapting to climate change are going to prove so unfathomably expensive that I don’t think we collectively, or our governments, can really wrap their minds around that yet.
The flip side of what that investment will require is what I believe is the reality, the truth, that certain places will never be able to afford that adaptation. This may be a very long way into the future, and it depends on the frequency of disasters, but there will become places that are unprotectable, where we cannot afford to rebuild, where we cannot afford to build in the way that is truly resilient, because it is too expensive. We’re more likely as a society to spend that money and make those investments in the larger urban places where there’s a collectivization of the services and community support for the population that lives there.
We’re trending into the science-fiction realm here—or at least my imagining of the future—but when I try to imagine what a community that is failing on the far end of this transition looks like, the researchers that I talk to tell me to expect the disappearance of publicly provided services like garbage pickup, 911 service and emergency services, and the availability of insurance and those basic community fundamentals first. That might follow the decrease of a tax base that dwindles as the population shrinks, which also precipitates a drop in the quality of schools and a drop in the quality of infrastructure.
All of these things start to self perpetuate and spiral downwards, and then once you lose that consistency of services and economic stability, I think of it as communities kind of de-evolving back into what we would call a rural state, where eventually you have people who have to be self-sufficient and self-dependent in order to live there.
CURWOOD: What are the odds that Helene might just prove to be a tipping point for awareness of the growing risk from climate disruption in this country, and that there’ll be broader acceptance in taking steps to both reduce our emissions and also to adapt to the effects of the emissions that have already been made?
LUSTGARTEN: I think there’s a good chance that Helene alters the conversation. It depends in part on how that conversation is framed in the coming days and weeks, and whether we discuss what’s happened in the context of climate change, and whether the attribution science comes out and says that Helene was significantly influenced by climate change. All of those things will steer this conversation, but there’s no doubt that the frustration and danger and horror experienced by so many people, particularly on the Gulf Coast, is reaching a saturation point of sorts that I would expect to change the conversation around climate change.
There’s no doubt that in places like Asheville, North Carolina, the level of surprise—of sort of dumbfoundedness—that something like this could happen from a hurricane that came off the coast, and that it could dump so much water so quickly, is a different but similar kind of awakening.
Absolutely, there will be fresh conversations in those parts of the country about whether this was climate-caused, and what that means. If you’re trying to imagine this happening repeatedly, what that means for your life and your future, those are the seeds for what will translate, one would hope, to offering political support for climate action, or supporting changes in lifestyle and behavior and consumption that lead to lowering emissions. I think that’s really what we’re talking about when we talk about, do people see this as a turning point in their acknowledgement of climate change? Are they willing to do something about it?
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Hurricane Helene Shows There Are No Climate Havens—But People Still Hope to Move to One
Experts say the effects of global warming are playing a greater role in where people decide to move
Women walk in the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. Sean Rayford/Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | Hurricane Helene demolished the notion there are places on Earth immune from climate change — an already shaky premise that was further discredited by widespread damage to Asheville, North Carolina, a so-called climate haven.
Even so, experts say climate is a growing factor in many people’s relocation decisions. And some places do have lower comparative risks depending on the type of disaster. That can — and should — influence their decisions on where to move, they say.
“There's no such thing as a climate haven,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University. “But what has happened is that various people, including myself, have identified cities where people are moving to, where consumer preferences are shaping the demand for places.”
Lower disaster risks, milder weather and cheaper insurance costs — all affected by local climate variables — are some of the preferences driving people’s decisions on where to move, he said.
Keenan is careful to caution that no location is completely immune to extreme weather events. His own work has been cited — out of context, he says — in lists of so-called climate havens produced by media outlets over the last few years, describing places purportedly isolated from extreme weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods.
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Social media users began resurfacing many of these lists in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, pointing to the irony. Asheville — where Helene left entire neighborhoods submerged in floodwaters — has frequently appeared on them.
“Everyone has been asking about Asheville as a climate haven,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “We’ve never really agreed with that. There’s always been a risk of flooding and fire.”
While climate havens may be a myth, Keenan said his work has highlighted the fact that some cities around the U.S. are becoming climate “receiving zones” — places where some people are choosing to move, in part, for climate-related reasons.
Asheville is among them, he said.
“Lots of people have moved from the coastal Carolinas to Asheville,” he said. “There's a lot of emerging data that suggests that climate is certainly on the rank-ordered priorities — it’s on the list of factors that’s shaping things.”
Other U.S. cities and towns are attracting inbound migration too in part for climate-related reasons, Keenan added. None of them are disaster-free, but some of them have lower relative risks compared to other cities across the same state or region of the country.
“Ocala, Florida, is the fourth-fastest-growing metropolitan area in the U.S.,” he said. “And a big part of the reason people are moving to this part of central Florida is it has one of lowest measures of flood risks, and it’s far inland from any immediate wind damage, and the insurance prices there are significantly cheaper" than other parts of Florida.
Climate is rarely the only reason motivating a move, Keenan added. And it can be hard to tease out the relative importance of climate factors compared with other variables that influence where people live, such as family relationships and economic conditions.
In fact, some parts of the country have high rates of development and inbound migration despite the high risk of disasters such as wildfires or hurricanes. That means even for people who are aware of an area’s climate risks, it’s not always enough to outweigh other factors affecting their decisions to move.
An analysis by the real estate company Redfin in August found that thousands more people are moving into fire and flood-prone areas across the U.S. than are moving out of them. And Phoenix is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, despite also being one of the hottest.
Yet for the people who are moving out of these places and into other rapidly growing cities, climate can be a motivator.
Some research suggests that climate factors play a role in migration around the country. A 2023 study, led by researchers from the climate risk analysis firm First Street, highlighted regions where people are leaving, or population growth rates are declining, in response to growing flood risks.
Another First Street study, published in August, analyzed a wider variety of climate risk factors, including floods, heat waves, droughts, wildfires and strong winds. It found that there are some areas exhibiting “risky growth,” where climate threats are outweighed by other amenities — but also some areas exhibiting climate abandonment in response to growing weather-related threats.
At the same time, much of Keenan’s understanding of people’s personal decision-making around relocation has come from his own interviews with people moving in or out of certain areas across the country.
“They all told variations of the same story,” he said. “It was too hot in Phoenix at the wrong time of year, and they were getting too old for the heat, or they couldn’t afford insurance and the cost of living in coastal Florida or Carolina.”
'Push and pull factors'
After 12 years in Sarasota, Florida, Allison and Tom Whitten were looking for a change.
Tom had been the director of tennis at an athletics club there since 2008, and they loved the city, but the heat and sun were getting to be too much. The weather felt like it had grown hotter since they’d moved there, making outdoor sports increasingly uncomfortable. By 2020, they decided to leave.
“We really needed shade — indoor courts or shade,” Allison said in an interview with POLITICO's E&E News. “What we opted for was San Francisco, with 50-to75-degree year-round temperatures and a little bit more overcast.”
Weather wasn’t the only factor. The couple was already familiar with California, having previously lived in Redding in the northern part of the state. They felt more politically aligned with that part of the country. And they were also limited to locations offering the kinds of jobs they were looking for, Allison added.
But climate was still a major factor in their decision to move across the country.
For most people in the U.S., though, relocations tend to happen at smaller scales. And local climate risks are often still important to people making decisions about where to buy or rent a new home in the same city or county, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the climate risk modeling firm First Street.
“Only about 15 percent of moves year over year are across state lines,” Porter said. “When people move relatively local, they're keeping the same jobs, staying close to family, have strong community ties. But they also know what streets flood because they’ve lived there so long.”
That means there’s a growing demand for climate risk assessments on residential properties for factors such as floods, wildfires or air quality, he said — even among folks who aren’t moving far.
First Street first started conducting climate risk analyses about eight years ago, in part to help fill a gap in the public perception of climate change, Porter said. At the time, many people thought of climate change as a problem for future generations, not something affecting their lives today.
Nearly a decade later, the intensification of extreme weather events worldwide has begun to correct that narrative.
“There’s definitely a market for the data now,” Porter said. “Eight years ago when we started, people weren't actively seeking out climate risk information about their community and their property, but I think it has made its way into a lot of those components of their life now.”
Real estate companies are taking notice.
Just last month, the real estate marketplace Zillow announced it would include First Street’s climate risk data on its for-sale property listings across the U.S., including analyses on floods, wildfires, winds, heat and air quality.
These kinds of partnerships are more evidence that climate is an increasing factor in where people choose to live, and one that may continue to grow in importance as climate impacts intensify across the country.
“According to new survey data from Zillow’s Consumer Housing Trends Report, about three-quarters (73%) of buyers said at least one climate risk influenced where they shopped for a home,” said Claire Carroll, a Zillow communications manager, in an email to E&E News. “While climate risk appears to be top of mind for home shoppers — it's just one of several factors that play a role in the overall home-buying decision.”
Porter agreed that climate can be one consideration when looking for a new home, but is rarely the be-all, end-all variable.
“There are those push and pull factors that essentially weigh on a person’s decision to move or relocate,” he said. "Those amenities and disamenities are essentially part of that calculus. Climate exposure just becomes a disamenity. It’s just another thing you pile into the push-and-pull factors of an area.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Chelsea Harvey covers climate science for Climatewire. She tracks the big questions being asked by researchers and explains what's known, and what needs to be, about global temperatures. Chelsea began writing about climate science in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Popular Science, Men's Journal and others.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida but towns hundreds of miles from the coast have seen some of the worst destruction. Communities once considered ‘climate havens’ are facing a harsh reality, there may be no such thing. William Brangham discussed the impacts of a warming world and what individuals and communities can do with Alex Steffen, writer of the newsletter, "The Snap Forward."
Read the Full Transcript
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Geoff Bennett:
Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida, but it's towns across Western North Carolina hundreds of miles from the coast and thousands of feet above sea level that have seen some of the worst destruction.
Communities once considered climate havens are now facing a harsh reality. There may be no such thing.
William Brangham joins us now with more — William.
William Brangham:
That's right Geoff.
Asheville, which is temperate, inland, nestled up in the hills with lots of freshwater, often ranks high on lists of so-called climate-safe cities. But experts are skeptical of the idea that any community is truly out of reach of the impacts of climate change. This storm has driven that point home in the worst way possible.
To discuss how a warming world impacts us all and what individuals and communities can do about it, we are joined by climate expert Alex Steffen. He writes the newsletter The Snap Forward.
Alex Steffen, so good to have you on the "News Hour."
I mean, as I mentioned, Asheville for years has had this reputation as, a haven a place you could go to live a safe life in the woods and in the hills, insulated in some way from climate change. What does this storm tell us about that conceit.
Alex Steffen, The Snap Forward:
Well, I think it tells us three things.
First, I think it tells us that nowhere is totally safe. And, second I think it tells us that while there are places that are relatively safe compared to others, even those relatively safe places can have a tragic disaster.
And that means the third thing that we all have to be thinking in our own lives, in our own communities about how we're going to prepare for what's coming and ensure that we have the best chances.
William Brangham:
As you mentioned, some places are more resilient than others and potentially more protected than others.
But do you think it's even a wrong question for people to be thinking about moving to a place that is — quote, unquote — "safe from climate change"?
Alex Steffen:
Well the way I like to talk about it when I teach classes and do talks is that the thing we want to think about most is moving away from risk.
There are places that we know for sure have very high and rising risks. There are places that have fewer risks. And I think that, if you live in a really dangerous, vulnerable place, moving is in fact probably the best thing you can do. And I think millions of people in America will be moving over the next couple of decades.
William Brangham:
I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking about — I mean, apart from the human toll that these disasters cause, there are so many embed assumptions made in where we live, the houses people buy, the mortgages that banks give, the businesses that are bought and run.
I mean, it seems those places — those are all done with an assumption of certainty. And this seems to call all of that into question.
Alex Steffen:
Absolutely.
We built these great lives for the needs we had in the past. And we have thriving communities and folks have homes and we have businesses and infrastructure that were all built for how the world worked a couple of decades ago. But the world doesn't work that way anymore. So there's been a discontinuity.
What we're used to thinking about, what we thought we knew, how we act and our expertise, all that is up in the air now because now we need to think and act in new ways. That's a really hard thing for people to get their heads around.
William Brangham:
Right.
In fact, the data, I think, indicates that people, rather than doing what you're suggesting, moving away from risk, are in fact moving into risk. They may not be doing it intentionally, but they're moving to areas that we know are more and more dangerous.
How — what is — what should individuals do to try to make an assessment about smart moving, if they're going to do so?
Alex Steffen:
Well, at the very basic level, we should be looking to resources like the FEMA risk maps that exist and making sure that we're not moving right into the jaws of harm.
But at a longer — at a larger level, we need to be thinking on a broader scale and understanding that each person's answers will be different based on their community, their politics, their race, their creed, and that each person also can balance different risks more capably.
And so we need to start digging into what actually makes a place safe, not just how endangered is it by climate change and other ecological problems, but how well is the community coming together? How effective is local government?
William Brangham:
It also seems that the role of government plays a big part here, because every time we rebuild a coastal community that has been leveled multiple times by storms, you're signaling to people, it's OK to move back here, it is OK to live near this beach or on this slipping wetland.
I mean, what role would you like government to take, broadly speaking?
Alex Steffen:
Well, in an ideal world, we would be moving much faster to head off further climate change by lowering our emissions, and we would be engaged in a nationwide process of helping people who are most at risk have supported migration away from those places, meaning that they have resources and help to actually make these moves, but also that we're making some tough choices, doing some triage about what places can we easily defend and what places might be a little too hard to save.
And, unfortunately, we are at that point in things. We can't save everything. So we have got to be smart about where we put our dollars. Right now, we're not even being smart at all. We're not — barely doing anything. So we need to do a lot better.
William Brangham:
Right.
And it does seem like the incentives are running completely in the wrong direction, that it's very difficult for a local leader to say no to those new housing permits and tax revenues out of concern for this, what are — what's often thought of as a future risk.
Alex Steffen:
Yes.
I mean, if there's any lesson that we have learned from Helene and other storms and disasters, it's that we used to think of climate change as being something that would happen elsewhere sometime in the future and with somebody else's problem to worry about. And none of those things are true. It's here. It's happening where you live, and nobody's coming to save you.
You have got to be part of the solution in your own life.
William Brangham:
All right, Alex Steffen, who writes the wonderful newsletter The Snap Forward, thank you so much for being here.
Alex Steffen:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple.
Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene.
The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022.
The storm and its aftermath illustrate the damage that can be wrought by just one of the unusually extreme weather events that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, however — and make clear that elevation will sometimes not be enough to protect the region against such events.
“Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future.
However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.”
“From a rainfall perspective, the Appalachian Mountains are woefully unprepared — at the community level, the household level, our infrastructure is not prepared,” said Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Severe flooding and mudslides brought on by Helene have left dozens of people in the region dead and displaced or stranded many others amid the wreckage of buildings and roads. Hundreds of thousands of households in North Carolina remain without power days after the storm hit, according to PowerOutage.us. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing.
Much of the rain fell on mountain communities with only one or two roads leading in or out, meaning that once they were washed out, it became all but impossible to deliver supplies and relief through overland routes.
Zegre noted the region has been hit with the aftereffects of heavy Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes before, notably in the early 1990s. Since then, however, the effects of climate change have likely made hurricanes more intense and denser with moisture, which made the aftermath of Helene “unprecedented” in the region, he said.
Much of what has made the storm’s impact so extreme, he added, comes down to a combination of the mountainous terrain and simple gravity. “When you drop that amount of rain in mountain topography, it’s hard to avoid being impacted by the flood.”
In the mountains, “the water doesn’t linger like on a flat flood plain … it kind of is concentrated, and it moves at high velocity,” said Philip Berke, director of the Center for Resilient Communities and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Additionally, Berke said, the region had already seen heavy rain in the days before the Helene remnants moved north, and due to the elevation, “cold air goes up, the dew points get reached, and the hurricane was just pumping in all that warm, moist air on top of a highly saturated situation.”
An area doesn’t have to be regularly impacted by extreme weather events to be devastated by one, experts said. Even if a storm like Helene is a far rarer occurrence for western North Carolina than wildfires are for the western U.S. or tropical storms are for Florida, a single catastrophic event can be enough.
“When you look at property damages or damages per capita and you look at the top counties in the U.S., in many counties one single event will shoot them up to the top of the list,” Walls said. “There’s a county in New Jersey that’s very high on the list purely because 99 percent of those damages came from Hurricane Sandy.”
“The lesson here is trends matter and there are certain locations that get hit repeatedly, but no place is really immune — every place needs to prepare,” she added. And when an area has limited resources — and a limited tax base — to begin with, a disaster at this level makes the rebuilding process even more difficult and complex.
“It’s easier for the city of Atlanta than it is for one of these small counties in North Carolina,” she said.
Berke noted that the devastation of the storm comes at a time when much of the region was experiencing the beginning of a resurgence that made it an attractive target for development. “They want to build. They want to expand. They want their tax bases,” he said.
Places like the town of Chimney Rock, which floodwaters all but swept away, were seeing new economic growth in areas like tourism, rafting and vacation rentals that weren’t part of their economies a decade ago.
“At the same time, the climate and the heat has been building up and accelerating, so you have these converging forces,” he said.
Ultimately, events like Helene and its aftermath demonstrate the need for both mitigation of climate change and a more expansive vision of adapting to its impacts, Zegre said.
“We can’t stop the rain, we can’t stop the rivers, so we really need to think about how to adapt,” he said, particularly if the influx of tourism and permanent residents continues. “We need to expect that these storms are going to be a worst-case scenario.”
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Can You Afford Climate Change?
Consumer pocketbooks are taking the heat. Climate change is no longer a theoretical issue that will happen at some distant point in the future, like 2050 or 2100. Already, unprecedented climate change is happening on a regular basis and clobbering the American capitalistic system via consumer pocketbooks. People can’t afford ordinary life. They’re priced out of the market. Everything is getting more expensive by the year, every year.
“We’re no longer in a world where climate change affects the economy, or where voters prioritizing economic or inflationary concerns are responding to something distinct from climate change—we’re in a world where climate change is the economy.”(Source: Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change, Wired, June 22, 2024)
According to Uncle Sam: “Already, over half of U.S. counties – home to millions of Americans – face heightened future exposure to at least one of the three climate hazards described in this report: flooding, wildfire, or extreme heat.” (Source: The Impact of Climate Change on American Household Finances, U.S. Department of the Treasury, September 29, 2023)
Every one of the threats is the result of human-caused climate change. Nobody has done enough about it, and it’s getting too late, too fast. Evidently, people don’t scream loud enough or when they do bitch and moan about living costs, not a word said about climate change. They’re missing the boat, the biggest boat of all!
The U.S. Treasury has identified three major ongoing climate change issues that ultimately hit consumer pocketbooks. For example, insurance costs for homeowners have turned into a choke hold, assuming insurance companies stay solvent in the face of mega-disasters. Indeed, this is a risk to the capitalistic system’s guiding light for every U.S. citizen, home ownership. Moreover, according to research published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), increasing climate risk protection gaps could pose a threat to financial stability to banks with large exposures to real estate, as climate change becomes a threat to the heartbeat of America’s financial system.
It’s gotten so bad that climate change can drain insurance resources in the blink of an eye: “California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018, likely fueled by climate change, wiped out twenty-five years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in that state. Globally, just three years, 2016 to 2018, caused more than70 percent of insured losses from wildfires for the period between 1980 and 2018.” (Source: Climate Change and U.S. Property Insurance: A Stormy Mix, Council of Foreign Relations, August 17, 2023)
Accelerating risks and actual damage from climate change are spurring private insurers in the United States to limit coverage, thus imposing stress on local communities and straining the country’s overall economic health. State Farm, Allstate, AIG, Farmers, and Berkshire Hathaway have all reduced or completely stopped coverage in areas prone to wildfires and hurricanes, leaving homes uninsurable or hopefully some kind of state government assistance or go Full Monty with no insurance unless an underlying mortgage is involved. Over time, RE values will start to cave-in, and the American dream of home ownership, home sweet home, threatened, uninsurable because of capricious climate behavior.
In California alone, Allstate, American International Group, Chubb, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, The Hartford, Travelers, Tokio Marine and USAA have restricted climate-related risks. The state is one of the world’s largest RE markets. A recent LA Times headline d/d June 2024 tells a sorrowful story: With Fires Burning Again, is California Becoming Uninsurable?
Private companies are reducing coverage, concluding that the risks, and potential losses, threatened by climate change outweigh profits. So far, this primarily affects a handful of coastal states. Still, in other regions of the country insurers have substantially increased the price of property insurance. Homeowner costs are increasing fast and faster than people can afford to pay. Historically, insurers looked to past events to determine the risk of future damage occurring. Climate change, however, has brought new, unfamiliar extremes, e.g., longer heat waves that kink metal, sea-level rise that exceeds seawalls, flooding homes, high winds that shred rooftops, severe drought that buckles asphalt driveways, and wildfires that obliterate whole communities in mere hours.
Additionally, excessive global heat is becoming a major threat to air travel, which is paying a price with headlines like: Airplane Gets Stuck on Soft Tarmac Caused by Heat, Passengers suffer 8 hours of heat. As a consequence, consumers end up paying higher fares.
“From superstorms to heat waves to raging wildfires, the impact of extreme weather is already felt in every corner of the country. Every day that goes by without climate action is estimated to cost at least $254 million, based on recent trends, and the average yearly cost of inaction for the last five years has averaged $120.6 billion or $3,824/second.” (Source: Climate Inaction Costs Americans’ Nearly $3,000 Per Second, Climate Action Campaign, February 23, 2024)
As a result, the cost of living has become a very hot political issue with unrecognized, underappreciated climate change at the forefront. Crop battering storms, hurricanes, flash floods, and atmospheric rivers dropping buckets of rain are more frequent than ever before. Forget once-in-100-years; it’s now once-every-other-year. Meanwhile, extreme heat waves not only damage crops, excessively increasing grocery store prices, but also crank up costs to cool buildings. And in areas prone to disaster in the South, coastal, and Southwest insurers hike premiums for automobile insurance because of climate risks to cars.
Little wonder that people are confused about why living costs are so high. The media doesn’t identify far-out climate extremes when broadcasting stories about families that can’t get by, can’t pay bills, or God forbid, the 60% that cannot scrape together $500 for an emergency.
And quietly, assuredly agriculture crop yields wither when hit by extreme climate thanks to punishing heat and soil nutrition depletion amongst climate-related events that clobber yields, like floods, like landslides, like scorching heat, like hurricanes as supply chains are blown off course, increasing the costs of goods’ delivery. These costs are borne by individual consumers at some level. Yet high price tags don’t list the hidden impact of extreme climate, yet high living costs become a political football during every major election cycle. This is destined to get worse, radically threatening, unless fossil fuel emissions, at the origin of unprecedented climate change, are stopped.
On a large scale, by midyear this year 2024, the US experienced eleven (11) billion-dollar disasters, and lo and behold, tornadoes slammed Iowa, not known as Tornado Alley. Climate change is altering the course of storms. “Meanwhile, the already strapped Federal Emergency Management Agency faces a budgetary crisis, and sales of catastrophe bonds are at an all-time high.” (Wired June 22, 2024)
Extreme climate change costs get passed along to individual consumers and taxpayers. Like it or not, you are paying through the nose for climate change. And it’ll get much, much worse unless, and until, fossil fuel emissions are stopped. The fossil fuel “cost-of-living monster” has not been tamed via enough initiative to do enough soon enough.
Indeed, abrupt unprecedented climate change should be one of the most significant political issues of this century because politics on some level must fix it or home ownership will become a privilege for only the most privileged class, which is guaranteed to override and upstage the festering lingering pent up anger of four decades of “globalization” cancelling the middle class, now looking for scapegoats, which climate deniers feast upon by tossing to the gullible a big fat chunk of red meat, like dark-skinned people, but don’t blame climate change because it’s a hoax. How is it possible to get the message across that climate change is the major component of America’s risks of an unanticipated downfall, not other people?
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