Karen Rubin, Columnist
Trump continues to lie (when doesn’t he?) about the Biden-Harris administration’s outstanding relief response to a historic storm that devastated six states and took over 220 lives – so far – saying that they are spending disaster funding on illegal migrants while neglecting Republican areas, and ignoring Republican governors – all debunked by the governors themselves.
And don’t forget that Trump tried to pressure Speaker Johnson to shut down government rather than pass a budget resolution and had he been successful there would have been no federal workers to mobilize to provide emergency response.
Now, with Hurricane Helene already costing $34 billion, Hurricane Milton barreling down on Florida, and FEMA expecting to run out of funds in the next week, 35 Republican Senators rejected allocating more funds for FEMA while Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to take up more funding until after the election – clearly expecting the suffering and hardship to be blamed on Biden-Harris and Democrats and not the traitorous Republicans to tilt the election.
And, even as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gladly accept federal aid, they have all but banished climate change from government policy and action. These Big Oil stooges have done nothing to mitigate disaster or adapt to be resilient. And they clearly do not see their states as part of a national or a global endeavor – doing their part to stem the forces that are heating the oceans that turn storms into super storms and cold snaps into a polar vortex.
As Margaret Renkl wrote in the New York Times, “There Is No Climate Haven. We All Live in Florida Now.”
Every three weeks, the United States experiences an extreme weather event that produces $1 billion worth of damage, averaging $150 billion a year ($165 billion in 2022) according to the latest US National Climate Assessment, CNN reported.
“The more the planet warms, the greater the impacts. Without rapid and deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, the risks of accelerating sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather, and other harmful climate impacts will continue to grow. Each additional increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses compared to previous increments of warming, while the risk of catastrophic or unforeseen consequences also increases,” according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
But, the NCA notes, “This also means that each increment of warming that the world avoids—through actions that cut emissions or remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere—reduces the risks and harmful impacts of climate change. While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming, the degree to which climate change will continue to worsen is largely in human hands. In addition to reducing risks to future generations, rapid emissions cuts are expected to have immediate health and economic benefits. At the national scale, the benefits of deep emissions cuts for current and future generations are expected to far outweigh the costs,” the NCA notes.
Hurricane Helene is already expected to cost $100 billion to rebuild the roads, bridges, communities that have been decimated. But there is so much – a life’s work, a life’s savings, a life – that cannot be rebuilt, reconstructed, repaired or resuscitated.
I am frankly sick of sending billions of dollars to climate change-deniers. There should be no federal disaster aid for any recovery, rebuilding, restoration project that does not require climate change and climate resiliency to be core to the plan.
You require communities to rebuild to be sustainable, eco-friendly, ergonomic and healthy, with clean, renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal) – walkable, bikeable; electric-powered cars, buses, delivery trucks, mail trucks, school buses. You rebuild affordable housing and commercial buildings with net-zero goals in mind and require sustainable agriculture.
The climate crisis is actually a disruption of the entire ecosystem that supports human life. And all of it is connected – greenspace; healthy living, working and recreational environments; affordable, nutritious food; clean air and water; healthy oceans. Communities need to think and plan holistically; states need to establish code (after Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, New York State joined a coalition of states to adhere to the goals of reducing carbon emissions); and the federal government should continue what the Biden-Harris administration has put into place, funding an economic and infrastructure renaissance based on climate action.
Trump has such unmitigated gall as to lie about the Biden-Harris administration response, when his ‘relief” to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria came in the form of tossing paper towels into a crowd and awarding a $300 million no-bid contract to a two-person Montana company with ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Whitefish Energy, to rebuild the electric grid (it didn’t).
But this outrageous lie that the Biden-Harris administration discriminated against “Republican” communities is yet another example of Trump’s accusation being more of a confession.
Politico revealed that when he was president, Trump would refuse to provide disaster relief until he could inspect political maps showing how many people there voted for him; want to cut programs that help prepare, manage and mitigate wildfires and refused to give California wildfire aid until he learned how many people in the affected area voted for him; dangled federal aid for Michigan if they would oppose the state’s mail-in ballot program.
Trump rolled back flooding standards to appease his wealthy donor, real estate developer Richard Lefrak; diverted $150 million in FEMA disaster funds ahead of Hurricane Dorian hitting the Southeast; threatened to veto legislation providing $5 billion in disaster relief after extreme earthquakes; and proposed budget cuts to NOAA that would have left the US unprepared for extreme weather.
But that was only the first term. In a second term, Trump and Vance’s Project 2025 agenda proposes eliminating disaster loans to enable families and small businesses rebuild after storms and to cut assistance for hurricane victims; calls to raise FEMA’s threshold for state and local government disaster assistance; advocates privatizing FEMA’s National Flood Insurance program and rolling back emergency response spending, putting the burden for preparedness and response costs on states and localities; dismantling NOAA and eliminating the National Weather Service’s federal weather forecasting.
One last thing: just imagine Donald Trump in the Oval Office, who can’t get through a paragraph or read off the teleprompter without rambling into irrelevance and who during his first term didn’t have the focus or interest to sit through a briefing, having to juggle a climate disaster of historic proportions, an escalation of war in the Middle East, a Putin invasion, and an impending dock strike that would cripple the economy.
Biden is handling all of these with Harris along side. They have the people heading the agencies and the teams necessary to get the job done.
See also: Viewpoint: Climate crisis poses threat to public health, economic stability
