Two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene caused unprecedented flooding in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Over 200 people died. Before the debris from Helene was even cleaned up, another hurricane hit Florida. Milton, a category four hurricane with 130-mile-per-hour winds. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman who rose to national prominence by claiming that “Jewish space lasers” caused the California wildfires, has a theory for what’s causing the hurricanes: that “they” are geoengineering them to kill voters in Republican-leaning areas. Of course, this is utterly ridiculous. Hurricanes have been hitting these areas for thousands of years.
But she’s not entirely wrong about one thing: these intense hurricanes are becoming more frequent because of humans. However, it’s not some secret conspiracy to change the outcome of the election. Instead, it’s something that we’ve known about for almost 50 years: climate change.
As hurricanes are destroying the southeast, large parts of the West Coast are on fire. It has become an annual occurrence for devastating wildfires to ravage parts of California during what has become known as the state’s “wildfire season.” California’s wildfire season did not exist until about 10 years ago. As with the increasing destruction caused by hurricanes, wildfires are becoming more intense more frequently.
97 percent of scientists believe that climate-change is real and caused by carbon dioxide emissions from human activity. But despite this overwhelming evidence, our government seems to ignore the threat that climate change poses. One political party refuses to even acknowledge its existence. During the Vice Presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee J.D. Vance denied that fossil fuels were the cause of climate change before proposing that we use “more natural gas.” Of course, increasing the use of fossil fuels would make climate change worse, not better.
The Democratic party is slightly better. They are at least willing to acknowledge that climate change is real. However, the party as a whole does not have a coherent plan to fight the climate crisis. The only climate legislation passed when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House was the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided for 15,000 electric vehicle chargers. Democrats often propose electric vehicles as the solution to climate change, despite the fact that cars account for less than 10 percent of emissions.
Whenever fighting climate change is brought up, people always respond by saying that it is just too expensive. Indeed, the price of a Green New Deal is estimated to be tens of trillions of dollars. That sounds like a lot. That actually is a lot. However, when we have hurricanes that kill hundreds and cause billions of dollars in damages occurring every two weeks, the cost of inaction is even higher.
