WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 180 people. Thousands of people in the Carolinas still lack running water, cellphone service and electricity.
President Joe Biden toured some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter on Wednesday. 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 to get a closer look at the hurricane devastation. He is expected to visit Georgia and Florida later this week.
“Storms are getting stronger and stronger,” Biden said 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, the state capital. “They must be brain dead if they do.”
Harris, meanwhile, hugged and huddled with a family 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.
