How Hurricanes Helene and Milton Delivered an October Surprise

Since two devastating hurricanes brought death and destruction across the southeastern US, the response from the presidential candidates, the media, and voters has been deafening. Headlines screamed that the future of the planet was on the ballot November 5. Candidates raced to be the first to share their plans for a climate-safe future. The fight against climate change dominated the election conversation.

Record scratch. In reality, none of that happened.

As Grist pointed out in its excellent climate stakes round-up (which is free to republish on any news site), perhaps the biggest October surprise “may be that not even the hurricanes have pushed concerns about climate change more toward the center of the presidential campaign.”

“The near-total absence of climate talk in the 2024 presidential election is divorced from the reality the next president will have to face,” wrote Zo? Schlanger in an Atlantic piece, “The Next President Will Be a Climate-Disaster President ,” noting that this year alone the US has already “suffered 20 disasters and counting that did more than $1 billion in damage.” That article was posted on September 20. The disaster count has now reached 22. Scientists tell us that with climate change, these catastrophic unnatural disasters will become even more common .

There are two weeks before election day and journalists can still help voters better understand the climate stakes of this election. This election is so close that the climate stakes bear repeating.

Reporting Ideas

• Climate Voting Guides: We loved the Los Angeles Times ’s climate voters’ guide to the California Senate primary (check out their guides about Prop 4 and the race for US Senate ), and are thrilled to see more outlets take the same approach for November 5. Check out Vermont Public’s “Start here if you care about climate and environmental issues in Vermont’s 2024 election ” guide, Georgia Public Broadcasting ’s voting guide (that includes a climate section), and Planet Detroit ’s environmental voter guide to the 2024 Michigan general election. Got your own guide? Share it with us (@coveringclimate on social media or tag #climatevotingguide) and we’ll add it to our upcoming voter guide thread.
• Tick Tock: As Bill McKibben recently observed in The Guardian , “the results of the vote in November could reverberate for a million years.” The timing of this election is a crucial factor raising its climate stakes. The US has five years to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and reduce emissions from 2009 levels by 50% by 2030. If the next president and Congress don’t take action on climate change, the country will not meet that goal, Earth will get hotter faster, and we may trigger irreversible tipping points . Ask candidates who don’t support climate action how they reckon with scientific reality.
• FEMA and Resiliency: Despite misinformation, FEMA has ably handled relief efforts for millions of people affected by the hurricanes. But the hard truth is that we’re going to get more and more unnatural disasters and we will need the federal and state governments to be equipped to handle them. What does that mean in your state? What does that mean for the federal government? Ask candidates to go on the record about their plans for helping Americans in the future, acknowledging that the policy required to meet the situation is going to be big and expensive.
• Accountability: Remember that time when then-president Donald Trump pulled out his Sharpie to “fix” a NOAA graphic and change the predicted path of Hurricane Dorian to match erroneous statements he made? Scott Waldman of POLITICO ’s E&E News broke a story a few weeks ago that showed it wasn’t the only time Trump played politics with hurricanes. According to two Trump White House officials, Trump “was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.” Get candidates on the record about where they stand on politicizing disaster relief.

Take Inspiration

Excellent pieces we’ve highlighted in Climate on the Ballot this year.?

• Activism and Young Voters: “Climate change — along with gun violence, immigration reform, Israel’s war in Gaza and reproductive rights — are among young voters’ top concerns,” writes Nadra Kareem Nittle in The 19th . “Touting young voters’ growing influence, in March activists with the women-led groups Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives, Gen Z for Change and United We Dream Action presented their ‘youth agenda ’ on Capitol Hill.”
• Climate-First Voters (who don’t vote): We wrote about the Environmental Voter Project (EVP) and their findings that as many as 8 million voters who prioritize climate are also “unlikely voters.” We’ve seen great pieces from ABC News , CBS News , Bloomberg , and multiple local journalists, including WHYY ’s Sophia Schmidt , who accompanied a group of volunteer door knockers from the EVP in recent weeks. She reports that “Philadelphia is one of four cities where the group is canvassing this fall.”
• Fracking : Do Pennsylvania voters really love fracking? The Guardian ’s Oliver Milman and Thalia Juarez talked to voters in the small town of Dimock, Penn., who “have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply that was ruined in 2009” by a fracked gas drilling company. “The bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents” of the town.
• Young Women : Many are calling this the “gender election” because of the wide divide between women and men under 30. 纽约时报 reports that “67% of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men” and discussed the phenomenon in The Daily podcast last week. Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report wrote about “college student turnout being way up” in this election and interviewed several young women, who said climate change was one of their top issues.

Spotlight Piece

彭博资讯 ’s Jennifer Dlouhy takes a look at what a second Trump term “can — and can’t — do to the American effort to slow global warming” in this comprehensive breakdown . “Putting campaign rhetoric aside, it’s clear that the sweeping 2022 climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act has been built to withstand political attacks. Grant money has already gone out the door. Tax credits are now seeding factories in Republican strongholds,” she writes.

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