There Is No Climate Haven

As I write this post, we are hosting friends from Asheville, North Carolina for the better part of the coming two weeks.  While their home was undamaged, there is no electricity or water and it is unclear when it will be restored.  Meanwhile, another potentially catastrophic hurricane, Hurricane Milton, appears posed to strike Florida's west coast - an area where some are still reeling from severe damage from Hurricane Helene. Yet we still have Republicans and many on the political right claiming climate change is a hoax or not a reality.  One has to wonder what it will take to make people open their eyes much less have the political will to demand more action to address an every growing problem from which no one can escape, no matter how safe they may currently feel or how much they believe the problem does not impact them.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation and the reality that there is no haven from climate change as Asheville, North Carolina and other parts of  Appalachia found out a little over a week ago.  Denial is simply no longer and option and politicians who deny the reality of climate change need to be voted out of office.  Here are column excerpts:

Watching as Hurricane Helene slammed into Tennessee, distant friends kept checking in on us here in Nashville, but we were fine. Better than fine, in truth: After weeks of drought, we were finally getting some desperately needed rain.

But it was impossible to rejoice in the rain when the same weather system that erased Middle Tennessee’s drought was wreaking havoc just east of us. In Appalachia, from East Tennessee all the way up to Virginia and West Virginia, furious rivers were taking out roads — even highways — and washing out bridge after bridge. . . . . Mountainsides released their hold on rock, burying entire communities in mud. Whole swaths of forest were tumbling into homes and power lines and cellphone towers.

Western North Carolina seems to have taken the hardest hit, but the destruction was so widespread — covering more than 600 miles — as to be nearly beyond reckoning. . . . . As wrenching as photos of the destruction are, it’s the human losses that tear your heart to bits.

Nevertheless, the usual chorus of blame erupted on social media even as the rain was still falling: Why didn’t those people just leave? Why do they keep living in places where rivers repeatedly flood, or where forests routinely catch fire, or where hurricanes so often make landfall? . . . . And those are the kinder remarks. The cruel ones go straight to victim-blaming: Why didn’t they evacuate? Or: People who don’t believe in climate change deserve what they get.

Such questions never seem to consider the attachment to home that people feel even when home isn’t safe. How many of us would find it easy to leave behind the place where we’ve built a life — where we have family and friends and longtime neighbors? The place where we have work?

Moving costs money that many people don’t have, and evacuation isn’t cheap, either. It might not even be possible if the roads are already gone, or if there was never much in the way of roads to begin with.

I understand the impulse to believe that Southerners bring such misfortunes upon themselves by voting for scoundrels who deny the realities of climate change. When Republican officials routinely vote against measures that increase climate resilience, or when they support unchecked development on the very wetlands that protect human communities from storm surges, or when they gut legislation that would require new construction to be storm resistant, and when they then tell outrageous lies about the federal government’s disaster response . . . .

Take a look at a map of “disaster prone” areas in the United States. It’s a huge chunk of the country. Already there’s no realistic way to crowd everyone into the places that are currently  somewhat safe. Even the safe places aren’t really safe, or won’t be safe for long. . . . . Buncombe County, N.C., among the areas hardest hit by Helene, was until very recently considered a “climate haven.”

There’s no such thing as a climate haven anymore. We all live in Florida now.

Even the few remaining Americans who still dismiss climate change outright must surely know this. They simply choose to parrot the talking points of Republican politicians and right-wing media figures who are paid by Big Oil — or Big Construction — to lie to vulnerable Americans and leave them ever more vulnerable.

There’s no denying that we would be in much better shape today if utility companies and the fossil-fuel industry had not launched a huge disinformation campaign to cover up the truth of climate change decades ago, and if the Republican Party and right-wing media had not embraced it. . . . . Yet they continue to embrace it even now.

Among the most outrageous lies in circulation right now — embraced and promulgated by both Elon Musk and Donald Trump — is the false claim that F.E.M.A. has spent all its money helping undocumented migrants and therefore has no funds left to help hurricane victims. There is absolutely no truth to this story, as F.E.M.A. has explained, and even Republican elected officials like Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Knox County, Tenn., and Kevin Corbin, a North Carolina state senator, have called out the misinformation, but the rumors are still flying. Among the many ironies of these lies is that Project 2025, the Republican playbook for a second Trump presidency, calls for gutting F.E.M.A.

Maybe we’re finally at a point where even Republicans have no choice but to acknowledge that hurricanes are growing stronger. Droughts are getting deeper. Fires are burning hotter. While there’s still time — however we vote, wherever we live, whatever we believe — we must shore up against the next calamity. We must hold our elected officials accountable and force them to invest in the changes that will keep “natural” disasters from continuing to worsen. And in the meantime, we must help one another dig out.