WASHINGTON – The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene has brought climate change to the forefront of the presidential campaign after the issue lingered on the margins for months.
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia Wednesday to see hard-hit areas, two days after her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, was in the state and criticized the federal response to the storm, which has killed at least 200 people in the Southeast. Helene is the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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President Joe Biden toured some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter on Wednesday and Thursday. Biden, who has frequently been called on to survey damage and console victims after tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters, traveled to the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia to get a closer look at the hurricane devastation.
“Storms are getting stronger and stronger,” Biden said Wednesday after surveying damage near Asheville, North Carolina. At least 70 people died in the state.
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis any more,'' Biden said at a briefing in Raleigh. "They must be brain dead if they do.”
Harris, meanwhile, hugged and huddled with a family Wednesday in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.
“There is real pain and trauma that resulted because of this hurricane'' and its aftermath, Harris said outside a storm-damaged house with downed trees in the yard.
"We are here for the long haul,'' she added.
The focus on the storm — and its link to climate change — was notable after climate change was only lightly mentioned in two presidential debates this year. The candidates instead focused on abortion rights, the economy, immigration and other issues.
The hurricane featured prominently in Tuesday's vice presidential debate as Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were asked about the storm and the larger issue of climate change.
Both men called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed on the need for a strong federal response. But it was Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who put the storm in the context of a warming climate.
“There’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen," he said.
Bob Henson, a meteorologist and writer with Yale Climate Connections, said it was no surprise that Helene is pushing both the federal disaster response and human-caused climate change into the campaign conversation.
“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in big elections,'' he said. “Helene is a sprawling catastrophe, affecting millions of Americans. And it dovetails with several well-established links between hurricanes and climate change, including rapid intensification and intensified downpours.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast in the last week, an amount that if concentrated in North Carolina would cover the state in 3 1/2 feet of water. “That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
During Tuesday's debate, Walz credited Vance for past statements acknowledging that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and joked that rising seas "would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.″
Trump said in a speech Tuesday that “the planet has actually gotten little bit cooler recently," adding: “Climate change covers everything."
In fact, summer 2024 sweltered to Earth’s hottest on record, making it likely this year will end up as the warmest humanity has measured, according to the European climate service Copernicus. Global records were shattered just last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from an El Niño, keeps dialing up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said.
Vance, an Ohio senator, said he and Trump support clean air, clean water and “want the environment to be cleaner and safer." However, during Trump’s four years in office, he took a series of actions to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations.
Vance sidestepped a question about whether he agrees with Trump's statement that climate change is a hoax. “What the president has said is that if the Democrats — in particular Kamala Harris and her leadership — really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America. And that’s not what they’re doing,” he said.
“This idea that carbon (dioxide) emissions drives all of 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. If you believe that, what would you want to do?” Vance asked.
The answer, he said, is to "produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.''
Vance claimed that policies by Biden and Harris actually help China, because many solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other materials used in renewable energy and electric vehicles are made in China and imported to the United States.
Walz rebutted that claim, noting that the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ signature climate law approved in 2022, includes the largest-ever investment in domestic clean energy production. The law, for which Harris cast the deciding vote, has created 200,000 jobs across the country, including in Ohio and Minnesota, Walz said. Vance was not in the Senate when the law was approved.
“We are producing more natural gas and more oil (in the United States) than we ever have," Walz said. “We’re also producing more clean energy.”
The comment echoed a remark by Harris in last month’s presidential debate. The Biden-Harris administration has overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil," Harris said then.
While Biden rarely mentions it, domestic fossil fuel production under his administration is at an all-time high. Crude oil production averaged 12.9 million barrels a day last year, eclipsing a previous record set in 2019 under Trump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Democrats want to continue investments in renewable energy such as wind and solar power — and not just because supporters of the Green New Deal want that, Walz said.
“My farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting,'' he said.
“The solution for us is to continue to move forward, (accept) that climate change is real” and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Walz said, adding that the administration is doing exactly that.
"We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current'' time, he said.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Christopher Megerian in Augusta, Georgia, contributed to this report.