Ellen Stromdahl was at a garden party in coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Duncan stood up from where he was sitting and abruptly fainted away. Duncan is an outdoorsman in his mid-80s — still active and healthy for his age. Stromdahl, an entomologist who works for the United States Army Public Health Center, the army’s public health arm, rushed to his side. As Duncan came to, she noticed that his tanned skin was tinged with yellow. “This man looks jaundiced,” she thought to herself.
Duncan spent the next several days in and out of the emergency room. His doctors administered countless blood tests and ruled out the usual suspects for an octogenarian — heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Finally, on Stromdahl’s recommendation, Duncan’s wife, Nancy, asked his doctors to test him for babesiosis, a rare malaria-like disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black-legged ticks. The test came back positive not just for babesiosis, but also for Lyme disease, another, far more common illness caused by the same type of tick.
If Duncan’s doctors had caught the infections sooner they could have eradicated them with a combination of oral antibiotics and antiparasitic medications. But Duncan, weeks into his illness, needed a procedure called an exchange transfusion. Doctors pumped all of the infected blood out of his body and replaced it with donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, he was well again.
Babesiosis is rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports around 2,000 cases in the United States every year. But what made Duncan’s case even more unusual is that he contracted babesiosis in Virginia, a state that registered just 17 locally-acquired cases of the disease between 2016 and 2023.
It got Stromdahl wondering if babesiosis could be becoming more common in Virginia and neighboring states. She spent the following two years working with a team of 21 tick researchers from across the eastern U.S. and South Africa to assess the prevalence of Babesia microti, the parasite that causes babesiosis, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024.
The results of the study, published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology, reveal that the Babesia parasite is rapidly expanding through the mid-Atlantic. This shift, which has coincided with changing weather patterns, could pose a serious threat to people in communities where the disease has long been considered rare.
“Wherever we found positive ticks, there were cases,” Stromdahl said. “They’re small numbers, but that’s why we want to give the early warning before more people get sick.”
Babesiosis, which can be confused with malaria, is caused by parasites of the genus Babesia. Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
One in four cases of babesiosis are asymptomatic. People who do develop symptoms, especially older adults and immunocompromised people, can get quite sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Untreated, the parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to organ failure and death.
Babesiosis is typically found in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. Between 2015 and 2022, case counts in the states that regularly report the disease — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — rose by 9 percent every year, a development researchers attribute in large part to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which afford black-legged ticks more opportunities to bite people in a given year and more habitat to spread into.
Climatic conditions in the southern mid-Atlantic have always been welcoming for ticks, but warmer-than-average winters that have been occurring with grim regularity in recent years are turning some states in the region into year-round breeding sites for ticks and small rodents like mice, chipmunks, and shrews — the critters that carry Lyme bacteria and the Babesia parasite in their blood. Above-normal annual rainfall, which saturates the soil and adds to overall humidity in the region, also encourages the proliferation of ticks. The 2023 to 2024 winter season across much of the mid-Atlantic was 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, and many states had some of their wettest Decembers and Januaries on record.
Stromdahl has been studying the movement of ticks and the diseases they carry for decades. She’s seen it all — including the northward spread of the Lone Star tick, which can impart a lifelong, sometimes deadly reaction to red meat. But even she was shocked to discover how far the Babesia parasite had spread.
She and her co-authors collected 1,310 ticks in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware and found the B. microti parasite in all three states, indicating that there is potential for more human cases across the southern mid-Atlantic. None of those states had ever found the parasite in ticks before.
Many of the ticks the authors looked at were also infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The Lyme-babesiosis connection is an active area of research. Experts suspect ticks infected with one of the diseases are more predisposed to be infected with the other, but they still don’t know why, exactly. What they do know is that Lyme is a harbinger of babesiosis. Previous studies on tick-borne illness found that areas that saw rising cases of Lyme disease from the 1980s to the early 2000s reported more babesiosis cases one to two decades later.
“The findings in the Stromdahl paper are consistent with what we’ve seen in the Northeast: Babesia infection seems to spread where Lyme infection is already present,” said Shannon LaDeau, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who was not involved in the study.
Scientists collect Lone Star ticks, which can cause an allergic reaction to red meat, for research.
Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
The authors also examined where human cases of babesiosis were clustered. Of particular concern were two hotspots: the five counties surrounding and encompassing the city of Baltimore, and the Delmarva Peninsula — an 180-mile-long coastal landmass comprising parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Fifty-five percent of Maryland’s cases were from the Baltimore area, and some 38 percent of cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia combined were from the Delmarva Peninsula.
Experts believe babesiosis cases are severely underreported due to lack of physician awareness. Stromdahl and her colleagues hope their findings will inspire health departments in the mid-Atlantic to recognize that babesiosis is a growing concern, conduct surveillance for infected ticks, and put out public health warnings. If doctors in the region know to test for babesiosis, severe cases like Duncan’s can be avoided.
“Jurisdictions in the southern mid-Atlantic region should expect babesiosis cases,” the authors warn. “Tick range expansion is occurring at such a precipitous rate that public health guidance regarding tick-borne disease prevention and treatment can be rapidly rendered obsolete.”
Climate change isn’t the only environmental factor driving the rising density and expansion of tick populations. Efforts over the past few decades to reforest barren areas have encouraged herds of whitetailed deer, animals that pick up ticks and carry them miles before the arachnids drop off into the leaf litter, to proliferate. Declining rates of recreational and subsistence hunting are adding to deer overpopulations. At the same time, an ongoing expansion of suburban development pushing into forested zones is putting more people into contact with ticks and the diseases they carry.
“The most important take-home is that tick-borne disease is a growing risk,” LaDeau said. The big question as tick populations increase, she added, is to figure out where and when infected ticks overlap with people. “There is still a huge need for data to understand how often these infected ticks come into contact with humans.”
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” President Donald Trump said in a social media post last summer, four months before he defeated former vice president Kamala Harris and made a triumphant return to power.
He was referring to a 900-page document written by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, and other conservative groups. At least 140 members of Trump’s own former administration worked on the roadmap, which laid out the ways a second Trump term could fundamentally transform the federal government’s role in society.
“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said in July as he tried to distance himself from the controversy.
If the notion that Trump was completely unaware of the origins or the contents of Project 2025 didn’t pass the straight face test then, it’s ludicrous now.
Fewer than four months in, the Trump administration has accomplished policies that mirror about a third of the more than 300 policy objectives outlined in the blueprint, according to a crowdsourced website called Project 2025 Tracker. They include scrubbing mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion from government documents and agencies; dismantling the Department of Education; and freezing federal science grants across the government. More than 60 measures recommended by the document are currently in progress.
“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, told Politico last month.
About a fifth of the climate and environment measures proposed by the architects of Project 2025 have been implemented, according to another Project 2025 tracker run jointly by the policy think tanks Governing for Impact and the Center for Progressive Reform. Those measures include boosting fossil fuel drilling on public lands, rolling back grants for green programs, and reforming climate statutes.
All of these actions have something in common: they’ve flowed directly from the executive branch of government. Most of them have been decreed by Trump himself or have come from his cabinet secretaries.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, second from left, looks on as President Donald Trump signs executive orders about boosting coal production on April 8.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
James Goodwin, who runs the Project 2025 tracker at the Center for Progressive Reform, calls these executive measures “the stuff that doesn’t require much process” — in contrast to legislation, which requires negotiation with both houses of Congress. Trump has signed just five laws so far, the lowest count since Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1953. He’s barreled ahead with an agenda that effectively ignores Congress, with little apparent concern for whether his actions are even legal. That means that, even as the Trump administration makes rapid headway on the Project 2025 agenda, the methods the administration has used to achieve those goals are being challenged in court — especially when they seek to unravel prior legislation.
“In Trump 1.0 they compiled a miserable, long loss record in court because they were so procedurally sloppy,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “So far they may be doing even worse.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order called “Unleashing American Energy” that bundled multiple recommendations that echo Project 2025 objectives. Among these was a suggestion to update an Environmental Protection Agency rule called the endangerment finding. The policy requires the EPA to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other sources of pollution under the Clean Air Act. In March, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said he aims to formally reconsider the rule and all regulations that rely on it —including most major U.S. climate regulations. Legal experts say weakening the rule or reversing it won’t be a cakewalk by any means — the finding is rooted in laws passed by Congress and has already withstood a barrage of legal challenges.
At the Department of the Interior, or DOI, similar Project 2025-inspired attacks on climate and environmental regulations are underway. Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” order directed the DOI to assess and expand drilling and mining opportunities on public lands and expand energy extraction in Alaska under the guise of an “energy emergency” independent analysts say does not exist.
Last week, the DOI made good on that directive by announcing it would shrink down the time it takes to review the environmental and social impact of oil and gas projects on public lands — a process required by federal law — from one to two years to as little as 14 days. Truncated environmental review processes are sure to be challenged in court, and the administration’s efforts to boost drilling on public lands could also run into a 2024 rule that balances conservation with other public lands uses such as energy development and herd grazing.
Protesters rally outside Yosemite Valley Welcome Center in California in March during a national day of action against Trump administration’s mass firing of National Park Service employees. Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
At the Department of Energy, Secretary Chris Wright is overseeing Trump directives to quickly approve new liquified natural gas exports and freeze funding from the largest climate-spending bill in American history, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The natural gas exports will be litigated, Gerrard said, on the basis of whether emissions from those exports violate the National Environmental Policy Act, the same law the administration is trying to sidestep in order to expedite reviews of oil and gas drilling on public lands. Efforts to claw back Inflation Reduction Act funding have already been the subject of many legal challenges.
The text of Project 2025 encourages a future conservative president to use every executive power at their disposal, but it doesn’t recommend blatantly breaking the law. “One might imagine that the policy experts that worked on the Project 2025 plan assumed that the Trump administration would do things legally,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Conservation Voters.
The blueprint’s authors write that White House lawyers should do as much as they can to promote the president’s agenda “within the bounds of the law.” It’s one of many places where the document references legal limits established by Congress and the Supreme Court and encourages a future administration to “look to the legislative branch for decisive action.”
“Their assumption was that actors on their side would be rational,” Willett said. “That has not been the case.”
Since taking office, Trump has ignored judicial orders, staging a constitutional showdown between the executive and judicial branches — a matchup that exceedingly few presidents in American history have sought to force.
A high-profile clash is playing out between a U.S. district judge, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration over the deportation of a Maryland man to El Salvador. Douglas Rissing / Getty Images
After a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore federal funding, he soon found that the administration was not fully complying with his order. This month, a federal judge ruled that the administration violated a court order in its rush to halt Federal Emergency Management Administration grant funding to states. There’s also a high-profile clash playing out between the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration over the deportation of a Maryland man to El Salvador.
But the Trump administration’s breakneck pace has also kicked up a haze that makes it hard for the federal government and states to govern, and could make it more difficult for Trump to accomplish his full agenda in the long term as he makes the switch from institutional policy changes to legislative policy changes, like extending his 2017 tax cuts.
“They’re just breaking things and then they’re going to have to put it back together again,” said Elaine Karmack, who served as senior policy adviser to former vice president Al Gore beginning in 1993. President Bill Clinton, who was inaugurated that year, sought to modernize the federal government in service of a government that “works better and costs less.” The Clinton administration did this legally — abiding by congressional statues and legal precedent as it sought to trim fat and balance the federal budget. In the end, Karmack helped Gore cut 426,000 federal jobs, slash 16,000 pages of federal regulation, reengineer the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies, and otherwise accomplish a version of the kind of downsizing Project 2025 calls for.
“Everything they’ve done is basically illegal,” Kamarck added. “There will be consequences to the chaos.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is known for responding to extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires — the kinds of disasters that are becoming more intense and common as climate change gets worse. But the agency also has a program that sends billions of dollars to communities, municipalities, and states proactively so that they can prepare for these events before they hit.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is known for responding to extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires — the kinds of disasters that are becoming more intense and common as climate change gets worse. But the agency also has a program that sends billions of dollars to communities, municipalities, and states proactively so that they can prepare for these events before they hit.
In an internal FEMA memorandum obtained and first reported by Grist, the Trump administration announced it plans to dismantle that program — the biggest climate adaptation initiative the federal government has ever funded — even as disasters incur hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damages across the United States. The decision comes as at least seven people were killed this week as tornadoes and catastrophic flooding descended on the central United States in what meteorologists called a once in a generation event.
The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, or BRIC, was established in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term, replacing a similar FEMA initiative. BRIC’s first round of funding was launched in 2020, when Trump was still in office, and in 2023, the program awarded close to a billion dollars to scores of communities, states, and Tribal Nations across the country. In January, before Trump began his second term, the agency opened its fiscal year 2024 notice of funding, with $750 million in matching grants made available to applicants from areas that received a major disaster declaration within the past seven years.
But FEMA now aims to cancel those grants and any other BRIC grants that have not been paid out yet by the federal government, according to the pre-decisional memo dated April 2 from Cameron Hamilton, a Trump administration official who is serving as FEMA administrator until the president appoints a permanent head of the agency.
“Following the Administration’s direction, FEMA is working to … implement the principles of cost efficiency and commonsense to our approaches and investments,” the memo says. The BRIC program generally shoulders 75 percent of the cost of a given resilience project, and up to 90 percent of the cost of projects in disadvantaged communities. The program’s emphasis on equity is what may have marked it for demolition — the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling Biden-era efforts to infuse equity into governmental programs and direct more climate spending toward underrepresented groups.
FEMA employees disputed Hamilton’s argument in the memo that BRIC grants “have not enhanced the level of hazard mitigation as much as desired.”
“I don’t know where that came from,” said one agency employee who preferred to stay anonymous.
According to a source within the agency, the Trump administration asked BRIC staffers to offer justification for the program and its Direct Technical Assistance sister initiative, which offers non-financial support to help communities navigate the BRIC funding process and identify the hazards they face. The request was made on Tuesday this week with a Wednesday deadline.
With a tight turnaround, staffers offered success stories from across the country. BRIC awards have helped communities bury power lines, protect wastewater facilities from being inundated by flooding, build culverts, and upgrade power stations. If the draft memo takes effect and BRIC is frozen, communities will no longer be able to apply for the grants for fiscal year 2024 made available in January. Projects that have been selected in past years but not yet disbursed funds will no longer receive payment. Partially completed projects will be scrutinized and reviewed, the memo said.
“The administration now has one of FEMA’s most effective grant programs on the chopping block,” said Shana Udvardy, a senior climate resilience policy analyst with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s oversubscribed almost every single year.” In fiscal year 2023, FEMA received more than 1,200 subapplications across all 50 states, 35 tribes, five territories, and Washington D.C. totaling more than $5.6 billion in requests. It was able to provide less than a fifth of the money requested.
A looming question is whether FEMA can yank grants that are being funded with money appropriated by Congress. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocated approximately $6.8 billion to FEMA for community-wide mitigation efforts, with a portion of this funding directed to the BRIC program. “If this administration does away with the program, it goes against a law that Congress passed,” Udvardy said, “so there’s a concern there to be raised.”
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued an urgent alert about dengue fever, a painful and sometimes deadly mosquito-borne illness common in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Some 3,500 travelers from the United States contracted dengue abroad in 2024, according to the CDC, an 84 percent increase over 2023. “This trend is expected to continue…
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued an urgent alert about dengue fever, a painful and sometimes deadly mosquito-borne illness common in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Some 3,500 travelers from the United States contracted dengue abroad in 2024, according to the CDC, an 84 percent increase over 2023. “This trend is expected to continue,” the agency said, noting that Florida, California, and New York, in that order, are likely to see the biggest surges this year.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency put out a similar warning, noting that there were 900 cases of travel-related dengue in the U.K. in 2024, almost 300 more infections than the preceding year. The two reports relayed a similar array of statistics about dengue, its symptoms, and rising caseloads. But the U.K. Health Security Agency included a crucial piece of information that the CDC omitted: It noted why cases are breaking records. “The rise is driven by climate change, rising temperatures, and flooding,” it said.
Workers from the Florida Keys’ mosquito-control department load a drone to spread larvicide in an effort to eradicate dengue-carrying mosquitoes in Key Largo in 2020. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Last week, ProPublica reported that the National Institutes of Health, or NIH — the largest source of funding for medical research in the world — will shut down all future funding opportunities for climate and health research. It remains to be seen whether ongoing grants for research at this intersection will be allowed to continue. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his agency plans to cull 10,000 people from its workforce, including new cuts at CDC, an agency that was established in 1946 in order to prevent a different mosquito-borne illness, malaria, from spreading across the U.S.
Taken together, the suite of directives will prevent the U.S. and other nations whose scientists rely on NIH funding from preparing for and responding to dengue fever at the exact moment when climate change is causing cases of the disease to skyrocket. The abrupt subversion of the personnel and institutions tasked with responding to a threat like dengue bodes poorly for future health crises as climate change causes carriers of disease like mosquitoes, fungi, and ticks to expand their historical ranges and infiltrate new zones.
“The disease pressure in the last couple of years is very dramatic and it’s going in one direction — up,” said Scott O’Neill, founder of the World Mosquito Program, a nonprofit organization that deploys genetically engineered mosquitoes to fight disease in 14 countries. For example, Brazil — the country that consistently registers the highest number of dengue cases — recorded a historic 10 million cases last year. The country reported 1.7 million cases in 2023.
The two types of mosquitoes that most often infect humans with dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, thrive in the warm, moist conditions made more prevalent by rising atmospheric temperatures caused by fossil fuel combustion. The vast majority of annual dengue cases are asymptomatic, but about 25 percent of people infected, depending on the population, develop symptoms like fever, headache, and joint pain. A small percentage of those cases result in severe sickness, hospitalization, and even death.
The number of severe dengue infections corresponds roughly to the size of the pool of people infected every year. In 2023, when there were 6 million total dengue infections, 6,000 people died. In 2024, a year when there were more than 13 million cases registered globally, over 8,000 people died.
Dengue patients, protected under mosquito nets, receive treatment at Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College & Hospital in Bangladesh. Md Rafayat Haque Khan / Eyepix Gr / Future Publishing via Getty Images
There is no cure for dengue. Patients in wealthier countries generally fare better than patients in developing regions with limited access to medical interventions like blood transfusions and places where waves of dengue patients overwhelm already-strained healthcare systems. Two dengue vaccines are available in some countries, but both have serious limitations in terms of efficacy and how long they confer immunity.
The NIH began taking climate change and health research seriously in 2021, and the institutes have funded dozens of studies that probe every aspect of the climate-dengue connection since. NIH-funded researchers have sought to understand how warmer temperatures shift the geographic ranges of Aedes mosquitoes, which factors predict dengue outbreaks, and how communities can protect themselves from dengue following extreme weather events.
These studies have taken place in the southeastern U.S., where dengue is becoming more prevalent, and internationally, in countries like Peru and Brazil, where dengue is a near-constant threat. The NIH has also funded studies that bring the world closer to finding medical and technological interventions: more effective vaccines and genetically engineered mosquitoes that can’t develop dengue, among other solutions.
“Disease doesn’t have national borders,” said an American vector biologist who has received funding from the NIH in the past. She asked not to have her name or affiliated academic institution mentioned in this story out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. “I’m worried that if we’re not studying it, we’re just going to watch it continue to happen and we won’t be prepared.”
Americans aren’t just bringing cases of dengue fever home with them from trips abroad; the disease is also spreading locally with more intensity in warmer regions of the country and its territories. Last March, Puerto Rico declared a public health emergency amid an explosion of cases on the island. By the end of 2024, Puerto Rico registered over 6,000 cases — passing the threshold at which an outbreak officially becomes an epidemic. More than half of the known infections led to hospitalization. Close to 1,000 cases have been reported there so far this year, a 113 percent increase over the same period in 2024. California and Florida reported 18 and 91 locally-acquired cases of dengue, respectively, last year. California registered its first-ever locally-acquired case of dengue in 2023.
A health worker fumigates against mosquitoes carrying dengue in 2023 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Thilina Kaluthotage / NurPhoto via Getty Images
“Dengue is already found in many places in the U.S. that have never seen this disease before,” said Renzo Guinto, a physician and head of the Planetary Health Initiative at the Duke-NUS medical school in Singapore. “To combat this emerging climate-related health threat, U.S. scientists must collaborate with others working in dengue overseas. With no resources and capacity, how can such collaboration occur?”
There are limited non-government sources of funding for climate and health research. The money that is available to American researchers is primarily offered by private foundations like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The grants these philanthropies offer annually pale in comparison to the $40 million Congress made available annually through the NIH for climate and health research in the two years before Trump took office. Researchers will be forced to compete for a small pool of funding in the coming years, which will likely lead to fewer studies and less innovation in the years to come. “The end result will be that much less of this work would be done — we would all tell you to the detriment of Americans long term,” said the vector biologist.
As dengue spreads with more intensity in the countries where it is already common and slips across borders into zones like North America where the disease is still comparatively rare, it’s clear countries need to expand their arsenals of disease-fighting weapons. But the U.S. appears to be leading a charge in the opposite direction, with thousands of lives at stake.
“We’re at a time when we need acceleration of innovation and solutions to very pressing global problems,” said O’Neill, whose organization receives funding from governments around the world, including the U.S. “It’s not the time to let ideology drive science rather than let science drive itself.”
In late February, Republicans in the House and Senate voted along party lines to repeal a Biden-era rule implementing a federal tax on methane pollution. President Donald Trump signed the measure into law on Friday — putting the country’s climate goals further out of reach. Since taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress this year, Republicans have set about systematically dismantling Biden-era advancements on climate change, no matter the size or projected economic impact of the policy, with varying degrees of success.
Methane is a powerful but fast-acting greenhouse gas — it packs a big punch in the short term and weakens over time. Studies show methane is responsible for 20 to 30 percent of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. U.S. oil and gas operations are collectively responsible for emitting more than 6 million metric tons of methane every year — the equivalent of 10 percent of the country’s annual CO2 emissions, if you’re looking at a greenhouse gas’s first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which often leaks out of drilling sites, pipelines, and storage facilities.
When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he made it clear that he intended to become the first president in American history to successfully take on climate change — a goal that necessarily included targeting methane emissions. In 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — legislation that offered hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, loans, and grants to households, utilities, and industries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
The IRA also amended the Clean Air Act to include a provision that directed the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a methane fee for major producers of oil and gas — essentially, taxing fossil fuel companies for every ton of the greenhouse gas they emitted above a certain threshold. The legislation included subsidies to help producers who emitted methane over the legal limit to install gas-trapping technology to reduce their emissions.
The rule the EPA finalized in November last year, technically called the Waste Emissions Charge, would have applied to facilities that produce volumes of methane that exceed the equivalent of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The fee started at $900 per ton of methane in 2024 and would have risen to $1,200 per ton in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026 and every year beyond that. Most big oil and gas companies already meet the standards laid out in Biden’s fee, which means they wouldn’t have had to pay anything. The EPA was supposed to start tallying up fees this year based on 2024 emissions data, but Republicans repealed it before the agency could start collecting penalties.
The fee, had it taken effect, would have been the first-ever federal tax directly imposed on a greenhouse gas. It would have applied to roughly a third of the methane emissions that come from oil and gas infrastructure in the U.S. and diverted 1.2 metric tons of methane through 2035 — the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars offline for a year.
Shell, BP, and other oil majors supported the initiative. But other parts of the oil and gas industry, and Republicans in Congress, opposed it.
Natural gas is flared during an oil drilling operation in the Permian Basin in Andrews, Texas, in 2022. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
“No one wants to do business when the federal government creates regulations that will put them out of business, which is what this natural gas tax is doing,” said Republican August Pfluger of San Angelo, Texas, the Congressman who wrote the measure that Trump signed on Friday. Pfluger’s district overlaps with the Permian Basin, the highest producing oil field in the U.S. “In reality this rule has only stifled American energy production, discouraged investment, and increased energy prices across America,” he said.
“It’s hard to imagine how a country that’s breaking records for production is being somehow constrained,” said Jon Goldstein, associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy transition program. “I don’t think that argument really holds water.”
However, the tax tackled only a sliver of U.S. methane emissions. The American agricultural and waste sectors produced almost twice as much methane as fossil fuel production between 2010 and 2019. But clamping down on emissions from those sectors is challenging. Methane emissions from agriculture come from myriad decentralized sources, like cows and manure storage facilities, making them difficult to regulate. And the amount of methane agriculture produces depends in large part on consumer eating habits, which are hard for the government to control.
Despite its limited impact, the methane fee was a step in the right direction, experts said. “There’s an order of operations in which we need to implement climate solutions,” said Daniel Jasper, the policy director for the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. “Methane is something we call an emergency brake, because we’ve got to do it now.”
The fee is one of seven climate and environment policies Republicans in Congress are targeting using the Congressional Review Act — a law that gives lawmakers the authority to reverse recently-passed regulations with a simple majority vote. But Republicans only repealed the EPA rule establishing the methane fee — not the IRA provision permitting the application of such a fee in the first place. If that remains intact, a future presidential administration could pick up where Biden left off. However, Republicans in Congress have signaled that they intend to repeal as much of the IRA as possible in the coming months, including the portions that empower the EPA to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump initiated a trade war with Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners. Following through on weeks of threats, he imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported goods from Mexico and Canada and a lower 10 percent tariff on imports of Canadian energy resources.
Canada and Mexico’s leaders quickly struck back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled an immediate 25 percent tariff on $20.5 billion worth of goods from the United States and promised to extend the tax to another $85 billion in products in late March. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced she also planned to unveil retaliatory tariffs this coming Sunday.
Trump’s tariffs, which are widely expected to raise prices for U.S. consumers, are also poised to upend the American electricity market. All U.S. power grids except for Texas’s have some level of interconnection with grids in Canada, the largest energy supplier to the U.S.
Historically, the U.S. has imported roughly twice as much power from Canada as it exports there, though that ratio has started to shift in recent years as climate change-driven drought has slowed the output of hydroelectricity in provinces like Quebec and Ontario. Some 98 percent of America’s natural gas imports, and 93 percent of its electricity imports — much of that from hydroelectric dams — come from Canada.
America’s reliance on Canadian power is not evenly distributed. Northern energy grids are generally more reliant on Canada’s energy resources than southern grids due to their geographic proximity to Canada. States like New York and Minnesota have also entered into energy market agreements with Canadian provinces to receive their hydroelectricity in order to meet ambitious and rapidly-approaching climate change goals.
From Canada’s perspective, withholding or taxing energy exports to the U.S. is an effective bargaining chip — perhaps one of the country’s most powerful. “I see energy as Canada’s queen in this game of chess,” Andrew Furey, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, said in January, when Trump had not yet followed through on his threat of Canadian tariffs. Furey’s province is one of five that supplies the U.S. with hydropower.
Niagara Falls on the Canada-U.S. border is a major source of hydroelectric power for the region. John Moore/Getty Images
On the evening before the tariffs took effect, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, threatened to cut off energy exports to the United States full stop “with a smile” if Trump continues to target Canada with tariffs.
On Tuesday, Ford announced a 25 percent export tax on power Ontario ships via transmission lines to 1.5 million homes in three states — Michigan, Minnesota, and New York — and said a full export ban was still on the table.
All three states affected by Ontario’s export tax have climate targets on the books that rely in some measure on hydroelectric power. Minnesota, Michigan, and New York all aim to achieve clean electricity grids by 2040. Michigan is relying in large part on its own hydroelectric facilities, but Minnesota and New York are to varying degrees dependent on Canada to reach their targets.
Experts told Grist it’s too soon to say what Trump’s tariffs, and Ford’s retaliatory measures, mean for these states’ climate goals — and their residents. “When you’re adding unnecessary friction into the market, of course you’re going to see price increases,” said Daniel A. Zarrilli, who served as chief climate policy advisor to former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. “Tariffs are going to flow to the consumer, either directly or indirectly.” Zarrilli noted that it’s unclear what those price hikes might look like, and who — ratepayers, utilities, or some combination of actors — will shoulder them.
The trade war may be felt especially acutely in New York, where developers are extending a transmission line from Quebec all the way to Queens in order to pump much-needed hydroelectric power into New York City. Once the Champlain Hudson Power Express is operational in 2026, New York City is guaranteed hydroelectric power during the summer months. It is not, however, guaranteed that reliable power during the winter.
As the state has electrified its power grid, energy demand has been increasing during the cold weather months. Now New York power grid operators are preparing for demand during the winter to double over the next 30 years. But whether the state gets the hydropower it needs to provide reliable, renewable power during that peak demand now depends on how the trade war plays out. “The fallout could be actually catastrophic,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which has helped push New York City to adopt a climate plan that mirrors the state’s. “It defies logic.”
Two white men in their 60s live hundreds of miles away from each other, one in Arizona and the other in Washington state. They are the same age and have identical socioeconomic backgrounds. They also have similar habits and are in roughly the same physical shape. But the man in Arizona is aging more quickly than the man in Washington — 14 months faster, to be exact. Neither man smokes or drinks. Both exercise regularly. So why is the subject living in the desert Southwest more than a year older at the cellular level than his counterpart in the Pacific Northwest?
A study published this week in the journal Science Advances makes the case that extreme heat is aging millions of Americans more quickly than their counterparts in cooler climates. The impact of chronic exposure to high temperatures, researchers found, is equivalent to the effect of habitual smoking on cellular aging.
A billboard displays a temperature of 118 degrees F during a record heat wave in Phoenix, Arizona, in July 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Imagees
Exposure to above-average heat has serious short-and long-term health repercussions. People may experience heat-related illness, such as dehydration and fainting, or sustain heat stroke — the most serious form of heat-related illness that can lead to death. Older adults and young children are particularly vulnerable to these impacts because they have trouble thermoregulating, or maintaining a steady internal body temperature. Over months and years, heat exposure can exacerbate existing chronic conditions like kidney and cardiovascular disease, and raise a person’s risk of mental health issues and dementia.
Eun Young Choi, a postdoctoral gerontological researcher at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the lead author of the study, wanted to find out what might be driving the long-term health consequences of exposure to extreme heat on a cellular level, particularly in people approaching their 60s. She was particularly interested in “non-clinical manifestations” of heat exposure, meaning she hoped to capture how heat was affecting people who weren’tshowing up in emergency rooms with heat-related illness or heat stroke. Her hypothesis was that heat was chipping away at overall health, whether or not someone could feel it acutely.
In order to test that theory, Choi analyzed blood samples from more than 3,600 people over the age of 56 who had participated in a large national health and retirement study. Those participants had taken a blood test in 2016 or 2017. Choi and her coauthor, Jennifer Ailshire, then used weather and climate data to estimate how many “heat days,” as defined by the National Weather Service, each participant had been exposed to in the years, months, and days leading up to the date of the blood test. They sorted the participants into demographic groups based on race, socioeconomic status, exercise habits, and other factors, and then compared the people in those groups to each other using a series of biological tests that determine how quickly a person’s cells are aging.
“With longer-term heat exposure — one year and six years — we see a consistent association between heat and [cellular] age” across different biological tests, Choi said. People living in places where temperatures are at or above 90 degrees F for half of the year have experienced up to 14 months more biological aging compared to people living in areas with fewer than 10 days of temperatures at or above 90 degrees.
“This study is one of the first empirical assessments suggesting that longer-term exposure to heat is directly associated with an acceleration of the aging process,” said Vivek Shandas, a professor at Portland State University who studies the effects of climate change on cities and was not involved in the study. It “adds to the existing work by suggesting that near-term mortality may be the result of older adults having longer-term and periodic exposures to heat.”
Two previousstudies found that people exposed to heat age more quickly, and studies in mice consistently show that heat ages cells, but Choi’s study is the first nationally representative research to draw the connection. The size and diversity of her pool of subjects helped drown out many of the factors that usually sully this type of data. Choi didn’t find any major differences between demographics — an indication that heat damages cells across the board in older individuals.
What Choi didn’t account for, however, are all the ways people adapt to protect themselves from heat. Some people, particularly wealthier Americans, might stay inside with the air conditioning blasting all day and night.
A construction worker takes a water break during a heat wave in Irvine, California, in 2024.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Previous research has shown that above-average temperatures don’t affect all populations equally. Extreme heat is particularly dangerous for people who live in urban areas with patchy tree cover and lots of concrete. These zones, in places like New York City and Chicago, are called urban heat islands, and they can get up to 7 degrees F hotter than surrounding rural areas. Urban heat islands tend to coincide with neighborhoods where non-white communities were historically confined by racist zoning practices, which is one reason that the average person of color is exposed to more severe heat in urban areas than the average non-Hispanic white person. These populations are also less likely to be able to afford air conditioning.
“We know that some demographics, such as those working outside, unhoused populations, people living in urban heat islands, incarcerated populations, and lower-income residents generally have longer periods of exposure to extreme heat (over decades),” Shandas said. “Accordingly, we might draw on these findings to suggest that some certain populations will need greater attention and care as we see forecasts for heat waves.”
Choi hopes future studies will continue to tease out these differences, particularly because by 2040, 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older — up from 1 in 8 in the year 2000. The results of Choi’s study also have implications for all age groups, not just people in their 50s and older. “I don’t think the underlying biology is significantly different,” she said. “We would expect to see some significant effects of heat in younger adults. And we really need to track people from their birth to older ages to see whether any of these effects can be reversible.”
Gabriel Filippelli got the form letter from the U.S. State Department on a Monday morning two and a half weeks ago. Since October, Filippelli has been teaching students and faculty in Pakistan how to use air quality devices to monitor air pollution exacerbated by rising temperatures — a consequence of climate change. The letter from the State Department, which had awarded the $300,000 underpinning the collaboration, said the funding was suspended, effective immediately. The project, it said, “no longer effectuates the priorities of the agency.”
Since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, his administration has sought to pause, eliminate, and claw back federal funding for research across the federal government.
Filippelli, the executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, is a poster boy for the on-the-ground effects of these new policies. One of his research proposals at the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the federal agency that funds and executes medical research, is frozen. Another proposal and four grants at the National Science Foundation, the country’s non-medical science and engineering research agency, are on pause. The institute he directs relies on a $5 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the law Democrats passed in 2022 that directs hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments to climate and environmental justice projects. The institute has been pulling from that money, which was authorized by Congress, since 2023 — but Filippelli is worried that Trump will try to take the remaining balance away.
Practically overnight, the steady stream of funding that allows Filippelli to conduct research, collaborate with colleagues, pay graduate students, and keep his institute running has become an endangered resource. He had to cancel upcoming trips to Pakistan, and reports experiencing confusion and doubt — unusual sensations for a veteran researcher long used to navigating the intricacies of the federal funding ecosystem.
Filippelli is not alone. Most researchers working in this country benefit from the roughly $200 billion the government makes available annually via various agencies and initiatives for research and development at some point in their careers. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, and their institutions by association, are sustained by this funding, which is responsible for some of humanity’s biggest scientific breakthroughs: weather forecasting technology, the flu vaccine, the Human Genome Project, the first nuclear reactor, the Internet, and GPS.
But that funding, which comprises a tiny fraction of total federal spending, is now in jeopardy, as Trump undertakes what will likely go down as one of the most abrupt and profound shifts in federal research and development policy in American history. In its first few weeks, the Trump administration sought to freeze all federal grants and loans — and has defied judges who have ordered the executive branch to release the funding. Trump’s staff also issued a list of phrases, including the words “underrepresented,” “socioeconomic,” and “community,” that will cause a federal research grant at the National Science Foundation to get flagged for further review. The president summarily dismissed government watchdogs responsible for making sure federal dollars get to where they’re supposed to go. The administration has also offered buyouts to more than 2 million federal employees, many of whom are tasked with distributing federal funding for research.
If these changes become permanent, they will have far-reaching consequences for the country’s understanding of and response to climate change for years, experts told Grist. “What it looks like to me is an absolute full-on brakes moment for any further climate advances at least in the short term,” Filippelli said. “But I think what people don’t fully recognize is that if you disrupt funding on a wide scale, even for a short time, the hangover effect lasts for a long time.”
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation are studying melting glaciers and the long-term ramifications in Greenland and beyond. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Before 2022, the federal government spent less than $15 billion annually on all of its climate change programs, including climate research and development initiatives. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate spending bill in U.S. history, marked the beginning of a new era. Most of the roughly $370 billion in climate-focused spending in that legislation was earmarked for the deployment of clean energy and technologies, infrastructure development, and incentives for consumers to adopt climate-friendly technologies.
But the law also authorized hundreds of millions for climate research, including $200 million for oceanic and atmospheric research and $300 million to the Department of Agriculture for greenhouse gas emissions research programs — the pot of funding that sustains Filippelli’s institute. This money is already funding projects that will help better predict future climate-related flooding, more accurately forecast extreme weather events, and develop techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order ordering agencies to pause the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, and his administration has followed through on halting payments related to the law.
Researchers who receive grants from NIH also receive a certain amount of money that goes toward supporting the universities they work in. These are called “indirect costs.” A researcher who receives a $1 million grant from NIH to study the effects of rising temperatures on seasonal allergies, for example, might also get awarded $300,000 on top of that that goes to their university to cover the costs of running laboratories, paying administrative staff, leasing buildings, and buying equipment. In this way, the federal government doesn’t just fund research — it funds the infrastructure that makes that research possible.
And that infrastructure helps drive the U.S. economy. Writ large, NIH investments support jobs and millions of dollars in economic activity in all 50 U.S. states, comprising an even more substantial portion of the economy in states like California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, which get billions of dollars from the agency. Last week, NIH announced that it would be capping indirect costs across the board at 15 percent. For the federal government, which spends more than $6 trillion annually, taking aim at the roughly $9 billion it spends annually on these indirect research costs is somewhat akin to looking for nickels in a couch. But the new policy could have profound consequences for American research and medical universities that depend on that funding to operate and serve communities.
“For a large university, this creates a sudden and catastrophic shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars against already budgeted funds,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, in a post on Bluesky. “It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this will be for the U.S. research and education systems.”
Sarah Hengel, an assistant professor in the biology department at Tufts University, which has an indirect cost rate of upward of 50 percent, researches how chemicals in the environment affect female reproductive health. She has three doctoral students whose salaries are paid for by federal funding. “These NIH grants and those costs enable our students to be trained,” she said. “We just want to do research.”
Trump’s efforts to drain federal funding out of research institutions are already encountering legal roadblocks and pushback from researchers who say they’re not going down without a fight. On Monday, 22 states sued the Trump administration over its indirect costs policy and successfully requested that a federal judge block the NIH from implementing its new cap. For the time being, Hengel said, Tufts is still receiving its grant funding from NIH, but she said that the chaos created by that policy change and the other spending freezes and purges occurring throughout the federal government are fueling panic and confusion. That, too, she said, takes a toll on science.
An activist protests against Trump’s plan to stop most federal grants and loans during a rally near the White House in late January. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
“These are clear attempts to undermine the scientific community,” said Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches the effects of climate change on tick-borne illnesses. “Somehow science and scientists, information and facts, are perceived as the enemy. The casualties of all this, in addition to the scientists, are the American people.”
Meanwhile, on January 29, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in federal grants it had frozen, noting the obvious fact that the executive branch doesn’t have the constitutional authority to revoke funding approved by Congress. The administration has refused to comply for weeks, openly disobeying that judicial mandate,violating a number of other federal statutes, and raising the specter of a constitutional crisis.
On Wednesday, NIH leadership issued an internal memorandum ordering staff to unfreeze grants across the agency, citing the federal judge’s order. Crucially, the memo said that the grants do not have to adhere to the indirect cost cap of 15 percent. NIH will “effectuate the administration’s goals over time,” the memo said, a warning to researchers that more changes are coming. Federal funding for research from other agencies across the government remains in limbo.
A few days after Filippelli got the letter from the State Department telling him that his project in Pakistan was frozen, he got a message from the U.S. embassy in Pakistan telling him that it would reinstate his award on the condition that he remove the word “underrepresented” from the grant.
“One can wonder whether this is just simply a case of we keep doing exactly what we’re doing but screen through our own proposals to make sure that we don’t use those oh-so-offensive terms such as ‘diversity’ and ‘equity,’” he said. “I think we can do all the same stuff without saying those words, but what really pushes my buttons and makes me want to fight back is why should we? How far do you bend until you’re complicit in the whole thing?”
In 2019, President Donald Trump appointed a lawyer named Mark Lee Greenblatt to root out fraud, abuse, and corruption in the Department of the Interior. Greenblatt quickly got to work, directing his 270 staff members to conduct audits, inspections, and investigations across the agency of 70,000 federal employees, which oversees 30 percent of the United States’ natural resources, 20 percent of its public lands, and its relationships with 573 Native American tribes and villages.
Until last week, Greenblatt was one of 73 inspectors general working within the United States government — independent watchdogs that keep tabs on federal agencies, which all in all collect more than $4 trillion in revenue every year and spend more than $6 trillion. On Friday night, he and 17 of his colleagues were summarily dismissed, in contravention of U.S. law. “President Trump fired me last night,” Greenblatt wrote in a post on LinkedIn over the weekend. “It’s all just so surreal.”
The firings leave the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other departments that shape the country’s environmental and climate policy without independent oversight. This comes at a moment of extreme tumult and uncertainty as President Donald Trump attempts to transform the federal government in his image. In his first several days in office, the Trump administration instructed federal health agencies to temporarily stop communicating with the public and ordered a freeze on the disbursal of federal grants through programs like the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the country’s disaster relief arm.
“All of this is so corrosive,” said an EPA employee who asked Grist not to name them out of fear of retaliation. Trump is “corrupting the health of every federal office with paranoia and distrust. How is anyone supposed to operate under such conditions?”
A flag with the United States Environmental Protection Agency logo flies at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Robert Alexander / Getty Images
Legal experts and nonprofit groups suspect Trump will replace the fired inspectors general with devotees who will turn a blind eye to malfeasance, corruption, and abuse — a shift that would put the country’s environmental policies and American public health at risk. “Trump’s effort to terminate the current roster of IGs and, if one allows oneself to speculate, install loyalists who will turn a blind eye to what is to come, is unprecedented and profoundly troubling,” said Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Federal employees at regional offices and agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. fear their internal reports and complaints will be ignored or dismissed outright, putting Americans at risk. One important role of inspectors general is to offer federal employees protection if they experience reprisal at work after reporting corruption or impropriety. Five EPA scientists who raised alarms in 2019 and 2020 about the agency improperly downgrading the cancer risks of pesticides, for example, called their inspector general hotline to report that they were retaliated against by their own agency for blowing the whistle.
Sean O’Donnell, whom Trump appointed as the EPA’s inspector general in 2020, launched an investigation to determine whether there had been a violation of these employees’ rights under U.S. whistleblower protection law and found that three of the five scientists had had their requests for vacation time rejected, monetary awards withheld, and arbitrarily received poor performance reviews. The office of the inspector general recommended that the EPA administrator “consider appropriate corrective action.”
O’Donnell, who has been scrupulous about monitoring the disbursal of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act passed under former president Joe Biden was one of the 18 inspectors general fired by Trump last week.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized more than $300 billion in clean energy incentives and grants, allocates money to support independent oversight of this spending, including new funding for inspector general offices. The majority of the funding from that law has already been disbursed, and Trump has moved to freeze what remains as he attempts to restructure the government. Legal experts say that move is illegal and unconstitutional, but even if a judge lifts the freeze, the watchdogs tasked with scrutinizing these funds will no longer be at their posts.
“All of the checks and balances have been stripped,” said Kyla Bennett, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that offers pro bono assistance to whistleblowers within federal agencies. Federal employees, she added, “can’t do the work that they need to do to protect the American people. And that is the point.”
The president downplayed the firings over the weekend. “It’s a very standard thing to do,” he told reporters. But the only other president who fired more than a dozen inspectors general in one go was Ronald Reagan, and Congress has since imposed restrictions on abrupt changes to these positions. Burger explained that the dismissals are “in violation of the law, which requires notice, and an explanation to Congress.” The White House is supposed to give 30 days warning before removing an inspector general.
The firings disturbed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle., “I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse,” Republican Senator Susan Collins, from Maine, told Politico. Senator Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, said in a post on X that Trump is “paving the way for widespread corruption,” and many other prominent Democrats voiced similar concerns.
Many Republican members of Congress, however, were unruffled. “He’s the boss,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, told Politico. “We need to clean house.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency tasked with protecting global public health. A day later, his administration instructed federal health agencies to temporarily stop communicating with the public, a directive that applies to the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The pair of mandates will effectively silo U.S. public health agencies from their international counterparts and sever the American public, health providers, and research hubs from information about infectious diseases, budding epidemics, and even outbreaks of foodborne and waterborne illnesses.
“We live in a globalized world and diseases know no boundaries,” said Jonathan Patz, inaugural director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former lead author for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 15 years. “If we take this myopic view of disease prevention and ignore the rest of the world, we do so at our own peril.”
Humans and disease have always existed in tenuous balance. Modern advancements in disease control and prevention such as vaccines and antibiotics have constrained the impacts of pathogens, but our control has never been absolute — as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates. Climate change is tipping the balance against us by causing the planet to warm at an unprecedented rate and supercharging extreme weather, flooding, and drought. A growing body of research indicates that these shifts are leading to a surge in ticks, mosquitoes, algae, and other carriers of disease, which are expanding into new territory and staying active for more months of the year.
A report published this month forecasts that climate change-driven factors will expose an additional 500 million people to malaria, dengue fever, and other diseases carried by organisms like ticks and mosquitoes by midcentury. Other studies show that warmer temperatures cause animals to mingle in new patterns and exchange higher volumes of pathogens. Viruses that jump between species have a better chance of making the leap to humans, a phenomenon known as “zoonotic spillover” that has given rise to some of the deadliest disease outbreaks in modern history, including Ebola, HIV, and COVID-19.
Withdrawing from the World Health Organization, or WHO, prevents the U.S. from getting ahead of these outbreaks and coordinating with other countries to respond to them.
“Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has this very sophisticated early-warning system,” said Arthur Wyns, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne and a former advisor to WHO. The system, a centralized database of information about disease outbreaks, is designed to alert countries when an outbreak is beginning. Without it, “the U.S. would suddenly be quite blind to outbreaks in the rest of the world,” Wyns added.
The headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Jessica McGowan / Getty Images
Trump’s decision to withdraw from WHO isn’t a surprise. The president began the process of formally withdrawing from the organization, citing its approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. Former president Joe Biden quickly reversed course upon taking office early the following year. Trump is wasting no time this go-around, which means the U.S. may formally end its relationship with WHO as soon as a year from now.
Trump’s decision doesn’t just wall the U.S. off from the rest of the world, it could also have far-reaching consequences for the countries that remain in WHO (every United Nations member other than the tiny European nation Liechtenstein). On average, countries pay about $100 million to WHO annually in membership fees. The U.S., the organization’s biggest funder, is an exception. For the past couple of years, the U.S. has been voluntarily sending about $1.2 billion total to the organization — about 15 percent of its total annual funding. Trump can prompt the U.S. to stop paying its membership fees but he can’t unilaterally decide to cut off all WHO funding — Congress would have to do that. “There’s still a battle to be fought, if you will,” said Wyns.
A senior WHO official confirmed to Grist that WHO’s climate and health research programs, which comprise a relatively slim share of the organization’s overall expenses, are not primarily funded by American dollars and will continue to operate regardless of Trump’s withdrawal.
But America’s influence on international public health infrastructure extends beyond its fiscal support for WHO.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has for decades worked closely with WHO to understand and mitigate disease outbreaks as they arise around the world and conduct research on malaria, HIV, and Lyme disease — the most common vector-borne disease in the U.S. — among other threats to human health. Countless relationships have been forged between personnel at federal health agencies in the U.S. and WHO’s headquarters and field offices around the world. These public officials are in regular communication with one another about issues that range from annual flu strains to outbreaks of bird flu to the swelling risk of malaria in high elevations due to rising temperatures.
Every four years, federal agencies and WHO approve funding for collaborative centers at universities in the U.S. that conduct research with WHO on public health issues like nutrition and communicable diseases. If Trump’s White House refuses to renew those centers, Wyns said, it will stymie academic collaboration on future pandemics, the threat of biowarfare, climate change, and other issues that fall under the umbrella of global health security. As of right now, it’s unclear to what extent these partnerships will be threatened by Trump’s withdrawal. “All we know is that it will make work much, much harder,” Wyns said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s directive to pause external communications at health agencies across the federal government through at least February 1 means health advisories, weekly disease surveillance data, social media posts, press releases, and other forms of outreach will not reach Americans unless they’ve been approved by a political appointee. Trump similarly directed some agencies to hit pause on external communications during his first term, and federal health officials told the Washington Post that these new limits may not last beyond a few weeks as the Trump team gets organized. Still, there is no good time for a nation’s public health systems to go dark, since time-sensitive notifications about outbreaks of foodborne diseases and ongoing threats such as the bird flu, a quickly evolving threat with pandemic potential, can save lives.
“It’s not unusual for a new administration to want to centralize communication,” Richard Besser, the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the New York Times on Wednesday. “It is unusual to pause all communication from an agency where one of its critical responsibilities is keeping the public informed.”
Rachel Wald always has a bit of a cold. That’s life when you have two kids younger than 5, she says. You’re always a little sick. But it wasn’t until after Wald and her family voluntarily fled the fires in Los Angeles that she realized the cough, sore throat, and itchy eyes she couldn’t shake were being exacerbated by the fires plaguing the city. “I don’t think I was really recognizing how much of…
Rachel Wald always has a bit of a cold. That’s life when you have two kids younger than 5, she says. You’re always a little sick. But it wasn’t until after Wald and her family voluntarily fled the fires in Los Angeles that she realized the cough, sore throat, and itchy eyes she couldn’t shake were caused by the fires plaguing the city. “I don’t think I was really recognizing how much of it was not the cold, but the smoke,” she said.
Wald, who is a director at a health and environment center at the University of Southern California, is among the lucky ones. Her neighborhood in central L.A. was never directly threatened. Her house is intact; her children, husband, and all they own are safe. Nevertheless, Wald, like millions of other Angelenos, can’t escape the health effects of the blazes. Experts expect those impacts to linger.
The wind-driven fires that have leveled a broad swath of Los Angeles have killed at least 25 people, consumed approximately 12,000 homes, schools, and other structures, and burned more than 40,000 acres since January 7. In the aftermath of such disasters, the focus is rightfully on treating the injured, mourning the dead, and beginning the long process of recovery. In time, though, attention shifts to the health consequences that reverberate days, weeks, even years after the danger has passed.
Wildfires, a natural part of many ecosystems, particularly in the West, typically occur in forests or where wildlands meet communities. It is extraordinarily rare to see them penetrate an American city, but that’s exactly what happened in the nation’s second-largest metropolis.
As state and federal agencies assess the damage, researchers say the health effects of the wildfires must be tallied just as meticulously.
“These fires are different from previous quote-unquote ‘wildfires,’ because there are so many structures that burned,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Everything in the households got burned — cars, metal pipes, plastics.”
Wildfire smoke is toxic. Burning trees and shrubs produce very fine particulate matter, known by the shorthand PM 2.5, which burrow deep into the lungs and can even infiltrate the bloodstream, causing cold- and flu-like symptoms in the short term, and heart disease, lung cancer, and other chronic issues over time.
But the fires that raced through Los Angeles burned thousands of homes, schools, historic buildings, and even medical clinics, blanketing the city in thick smoke. For several days after the first fire started, the city’s air quality index, or AQI, exceeded 100, the threshold, typically seen during wildfires, at which air becomes unhealthy to breathe for children, the elderly, and those with asthma. In some parts of the city, the AQI reached 500, a number rarely seen and always hazardous for everyone.
At the moment, air pollution experts know how much smoke fills the air. That’s shown improvement in recent days. But they don’t know what’s in it. “What are the chemical mixtures in this smoke?” asked Kai Chen, an environmental scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. “In addition to fine particulate matter, there are potentially other hazardous and carcinogenic organic compounds — gas pollutants, trace metals, and microplastics.”
Previous research shows that the spikes in unhealthy air quality seen during such events lead to higher rates of hospitalizations for issues like asthma, and even contribute to heart attacks among those with that chronic disease. A 2024 study on the long-term effects of smoke exposure in California showed that particulate matter from wildfires in the state from 2008 to 2018 contributed to anywhere from 52,000 to 56,000 premature deaths. A health assessment of 148 firefighters who worked the Tubbs Fire, which burned more than 36,000 acres in Northern California in 2017 and destroyed an unusually high number of structures, found elevated levels of the PFAS known as forever chemicals, heavy metals, and flame retardants in their blood and urine.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health has formally urged people to stay inside and wear masks to protect themselves from windblown toxic dust and ash. Air quality measurements don’t take these particles into account, which means the air quality index doesn’t reveal the extent of contaminants in the air.
Zhu and her colleagues have been collecting samples of wildfire smoke in neighborhoods near the fires. It’ll be months before that data is fully analyzed, but Zhu suspects she will find a dangerous mix of chemicals, including, potentially, asbestos and lead — materials used in many buildings constructed before the 1970s.
The risk will linger even after the smoke clears. The plumes that wafted over the landscape will deposit chemicals into drinking water supplies and contaminate soil. When rains do come, they’ll wash toxic ash into streams and across the land, said Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, an environmental engineer and interim dean of the University of Colorado Boulder environmental engineering program. “There’s a lot of manmade materials that are now being combusted. The potential is there for contamination,” he said, noting that little research on how toxic ash and other byproducts of wildfires in urban areas currently exists. “What we don’t have a lot of information on is what happens now.”
After the Camp Fire razed Paradise, California, in 2018, water utilities found high levels of volatile organic compounds in drinking water. Similar issues have arisen in places like Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in 2021, Rosario-Ortiz said, though the presence of a contaminant in a home doesn’t necessarily mean it will be present in high levels in the water. Still, several municipal water agencies in Los Angeles issued preemptive advisories urging residents not to drink tap water in neighborhoods near the Palisades and Eaton fires. It’ll be weeks before they know exactly what’s in the water.
As wildfires grow ever more intense and encroach upon urban areas, cities and counties must be prepared to monitor the health impacts and respond to them. “This is the first time I’ve ever even witnessed or heard anything like this,” said Zhu, who raised her daughter in Los Angeles and has lived there for decades, said. “Even being in the field studying wildfires and air quality impacts, I never imagined that a whole neighborhood, a whole community in Palisades, would burn down.”
Wald is back home. She’s still got a nasty cough, but her other symptoms are starting to subside as the smoke in her neighborhood clears. The fires gave her a scare, but she’s not making long-term plans to move on just yet. “I wouldn’t say that here where I am right now, I’m that worried,” she said. “But, I mean, it’s not great.”
Hello, and welcome to the last issue of Grist’s special series on how climate disasters are shaping elections. I’m Zoya Teirstein.
I was at an election night watch party in Asheville, North Carolina, last week when it became clear that Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory had become impossibly narrow. On the drive back to my hotel, I detoured around roads that had been carved away by Hurricane Helene two months prior. It’ll take years for Asheville, Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and other hard-hit communities in western North Carolina to recover from that storm. Residents will be reliant on the next White House administration to ferry them safely through this disaster and any others that may strike in the next four years.
As the final ballots were counted, evidence mounted that Donald Trump had swayed a significant number of U.S. voters to the right. But political observers pointed out that a handful of the very few counties nationwide that bucked the trend — actually moving further left this presidential election cycle — happened to fall along Hurricane Helene’s path.
A ballot marked for Trump sits on a stack of completed ballots inside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on November 5 in Phoenix. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images
Research has shown that people who endure a shock event like a hurricane and then receive a benefit from the federal government tend to vote for the party that delivered them that benefit. But experts I spoke to said that it’s far more likely that these blue shifts in Helene’s path are explained by factors that have nothing to do with the storm — at least in the short term.
“Remember that many of these Appalachian towns that were hit by Helene are really popular places for people to retire,” said Jowei Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “Trump was less popular among retirees in 2024 than he was four years ago. So this alone might explain some of the shifts you’re seeing in the Appalachian counties.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of reporting this series, however, it’s that disasters like Helene have political consequences that manifest over the course of years, even decades. In July, I wrote about Lake Charles, Louisiana, where a string of back-to-back storms in 2021 fundamentally restructured the city. City council members, elected before the disasters, are still struggling to figure out how many people live in their districts today. On the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this August, my colleague Jake Bittle wrote about what happened in Houston after an influx of Katrina evacuees reached the city in 2005. Houston’s mayor at the time, Bill White, faced immense backlash for helping resettle those displaced people, as a racially charged social panic over alleged gang violence imported from New Orleans spread through the Texas city.
The growing chorus of those demanding reform will likely become deafening — in some places it already has.
The thing is, while Trump and many of the people around him are proud climate deniers, climate change has become all but impossible to ignore. Disasters will continue to rip communities apart; the federal government, no matter who runs it, will struggle to deliver the aid people need; and more and more disaster victims will become very, very angry. The growing chorus of those demanding reform will likely become deafening — in some places it already has.
“It’s no longer just Florida and Louisiana, and it’s no longer just the states that deal with wildfires,” Vermont’s Republican housing commissioner told me several weeks ago. “Everybody is facing this. We need to completely rethink how we address disasters.”
After collectively traveling to six states and interviewing dozens of people, one thing has become clear: We’re just beginning to see the political consequences of climate change.
P.P.S. This newsletter is part of an annual project at Grist to examine how extreme weather is reshaping our lives. If you want to play a role in shaping next year’s newsletter, fill out this audience survey. It takes just a few minutes.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A state of emergency on Nov 12, 2024.
Hello, and welcome to the last issue of Grist’s special series on how climate disasters are shaping elections. I’m Zoya Teirstein.
I was at an election night watch party in Asheville, North Carolina, last week when it became clear that Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory had become impossibly narrow. On the drive back to my hotel, I detoured around roads that had been carved away by Hurricane Helene two months prior. It’ll take years for Asheville, Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and other hard-hit communities in western North Carolina to recover from that storm. Residents will be reliant on the next White House administration to ferry them safely through this disaster and any others that may strike in the next four years.
As the final ballots were counted, evidence mounted that Donald Trump had swayed a significant number of U.S. voters to the right. But political observers pointed out that a handful of the very few counties nationwide that bucked the trend — actually moving further left this presidential election cycle — happened to fall along Hurricane Helene’s path.
A ballot marked for Trump sits on a stack of completed ballots inside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on November 5 in Phoenix. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images
Research has shown that people who endure a shock event like a hurricane and then receive a benefit from the federal government tend to vote for the party that delivered them that benefit. But experts I spoke to said that it’s far more likely that these blue shifts in Helene’s path are explained by factors that have nothing to do with the storm — at least in the short term.
“Remember that many of these Appalachian towns that were hit by Helene are really popular places for people to retire,” said Jowei Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “Trump was less popular among retirees in 2024 than he was four years ago. So this alone might explain some of the shifts you’re seeing in the Appalachian counties.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of reporting this series, however, it’s that disasters like Helene have political consequences that manifest over the course of years, even decades. In July, I wrote about Lake Charles, Louisiana, where a string of back-to-back storms in 2021 fundamentally restructured the city. City council members, elected before the disasters, are still struggling to figure out how many people live in their districts today. On the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this August, my colleague Jake Bittle wrote about what happened in Houston after an influx of Katrina evacuees reached the city in 2005. Houston’s mayor at the time, Bill White, faced immense backlash for helping resettle those displaced people, as a racially charged social panic over alleged gang violence imported from New Orleans spread through the Texas city.
The growing chorus of those demanding reform will likely become deafening — in some places it already has.
The thing is, while Trump and many of the people around him are proud climate deniers, climate change has become all but impossible to ignore. Disasters will continue to rip communities apart; the federal government, no matter who runs it, will struggle to deliver the aid people need; and more and more disaster victims will become very, very angry. The growing chorus of those demanding reform will likely become deafening — in some places it already has.
“It’s no longer just Florida and Louisiana, and it’s no longer just the states that deal with wildfires,” Vermont’s Republican housing commissioner told me several weeks ago. “Everybody is facing this. We need to completely rethink how we address disasters.”
After collectively traveling to six states and interviewing dozens of people, one thing has become clear: We’re just beginning to see the political consequences of climate change.
P.P.S. This newsletter is part of an annual project at Grist to examine how extreme weather is reshaping our lives. If you want to play a role in shaping next year’s newsletter, fill out this audience survey. It takes just a few minutes.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A state of emergency on Nov 12, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.
Early Tuesday afternoon, Kurt Wilkening drove to his usual Election Day polling location at a church in Sarasota, Florida. But the 90-year-old quickly discovered no one there, the building destroyed by flooding during hurricanes Milton and Helene earlier this fall. So Wilkening hopped back into his car and headed to another location in Bird Key, the barrier island where he lives. When he arrived, he was told he was once again at the wrong spot, and directed to yet another. That site, a recreation center that doubles as a voting precinct and a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster recovery center, finally ended up being his correct polling place.
“Why didn’t they put this in the paper?” he said, gesturing toward the polling station. Wilkening, whose home sustained “tremendous” flooding and damage during both storms, expressed frustration at the run-around. “It’s been a real challenge. When you are 90 years of age, it’s tough to deal with all this.”
It’s been less than two months since Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s western flank as a Category 4 storm before quickly pivoting north to unleash torrential rain and wind on five more states across the Southeast. The September storm killed nearly 230 people, displaced thousands more, and caused some $53 billion dollars in damage. Even as North Carolina, the state that bore the brunt of the storm’s impact, was still assessing the wreckage, Florida braced for another major hurricane in nearly the same corridor. Milton hit as a Category 3 on October 9, knocking out power for millions and killing more than 20 people in several counties.
It was the first time that two major hurricanes made landfall in the United States within weeks of a presidential election. Georgia and North Carolina, both still recovering from Helene, are two of seven swing states that will likely determine the outcome of the race.
A temporary polling location in Sarasota, Florida, set up after hurricanes Helene and Milton damaged several other sites around the city. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
In Florida, record-breaking storm surge inundated coastal polling locations, forcing their closure for Election Day. Inland, in states like North Carolina, the hurricane’s rain-driven flooding washed away homes and roads, closed mail routes, and destroyed voting sites. Election officials along the storms’ paths scrambled to ensure access to early voting and absentee ballots for hurricane victims and establish temporary poll locations.
In disaster-battered communities across Florida and North Carolina on Tuesday, registered voters turned out in droves to cast their ballots. Many said they were excited to vote, even as the storms made doing so far more challenging than they expected.
In the Asheville metro area, voters arrived at Fairview Public Library one or two at a time. A few stepped inside only to reemerge seconds later, having discovered they had the wrong location. The Fairview Public Library is one of 17 last-minute polling locations in Buncombe County, which had to scramble to reorganize polling sites after Hurricane Helene battered the region.
As a light drizzle turned to rain, Sean Miller, a 26-year-old Democrat, left the library, having just cast her ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris. Miller lost nearly all of her possessions in Helene. The storm deepened her conviction that Harris was the right candidate. “I would really like to be able to keep the National Weather Service free and accessible to everyone,” she said, referring to a Project 2025 initiative to privatize federal weather data collection. “Helene didn’t change my opinion, but it made me feel more encouraged to vote to keep basic things like that.”
Election day scenes from around western North Carolina, including a sign redirecting voters to a new polling site and a temporary dirt road. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Stacey Troy Smith hasn’t voted since 1992, when she cast her ballot for Bill Clinton. This time, she’s voting Republican. She owns a small farm in Swannanoa, North Carolina that was destroyed by Hurricane Helene. “My fence is gone and bears have eaten half my livestock,” she said, standing in the parking lot of a last-minute polling location at Warren Wilson College. “I couldn’t seem to get any help.” Smith said that someone registered under her address and claimed the $750 relief payment that FEMA distributes to disaster victims for immediate necessities. The experience soured her on the agency and on the federal government in general. “I would definitely say a lot of people are negative against FEMA in this area,” she said.
Smith voted for Trump, but she split her ticket with some Democrats, too, she said. “In some areas, I think there should be women, but I wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris as the first woman president.”
A few miles away, at a temporary polling place at the Art Space Charter School in Swannanoa, Sarah Mclaughlin, a 25-year-old Amazon employee, was preparing to cast her vote for Harris. “I feel like there’s an obvious choice,” she said. “Everything Trump says is the exact opposite of what I want to see happen in this country.” Mclaughlin (“I swear that’s real,” she said, referring to the fact that her name closely resembles the name of Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan) heard the conspiracy theories that the federal government had purposefully abandoned the people of western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene hit, but she didn’t put any stock in it.
“We’re in the mountains, you don’t expect there to be a hurricane,” she said. “So of course there are going to be people who are angry because we’re not getting a response as quickly as places like Florida. I figured they would come whenever they were able to, and they have.”
Katie Myers / Grist
In Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, board of elections officer Charles McCurry sat waiting in traffic behind a jack-knifed tractor trailer near Ramseytown, reflecting on the scale of devastation in the rural communities where he had spent the morning. “It was absolutely destroyed,” he said of Ramseytown. The local polling place was not spared.
“The voting house was a fire department, and the fire department was completely washed away during the flood,” McCurry said.
When asked about whether he’d heard misinformation about voting, McCurry sighed. “Well, in the entire area,” he said, there were “rumors about FEMA, rumors about, you know, that the storm was somehow brought on by a particular group of people to upset voting in the area, yada yada yada. This is the kind of stuff people don’t need.”
County officials erected a makeshift polling site in a tent in Ramseytown outside a small Baptist church. The site is accessible only by a newly packed dirt road, created after rising floodwaters in the Cane River washed away the highway into town. Mccurry said early voting turnout was large. On Election Day, the speed was closer to a couple of people per hour.
A sign at a restaurant in Asheville.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Five hundred miles to the south, voters walked into the Cuban Civic Club in Florida’s Hillsborough County. The community center was a temporary polling site for residents in precincts hard-hit by hurricanes Milton and Helene.
Jerrie Daniels waited for an Uber to pick her up early Tuesday after casting her vote. She had to figure out how to get to her new precinct this morning, an added hurdle and costly expense.
“I was sort of counting my money,” Daniels said. She also didn’t feel like she had enough information to vote for candidates and issues beyond the biggest races. The back-to-back storms and the hurdles they created didn’t change how she voted, but they “solidified,” she noted, her decisions at the ballot box. “I’m an American descendent of Black slaves,” she said. “The election for me means a big change. A better life.”
Tara Gonzalez agrees that much is at stake. The 47-year-old mother of two got emotional in the parking lot of the Cuban Civic Club voting site about what the election could mean for her and her family. “It’s so personal,” she said. “I have a 17-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. And to me, it’s their rights, their future.”
Jerrie Daniels stands outside of her last-minute voting site, the Cuban Civic Club, in Florida’s Hillsborough County. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Gonzalez, a former teacher and union organizer, said she has been worried that the one-two punch on her community would negatively impact how people would vote, particularly on a local initiative that would increase property taxes to finance higher salaries for public school teachers and staff. “So many people were hurt by [the storms],” she said. “How can they possibly consider more… to afford a tax on their home?”
Elsewhere in Tampa, Victory Baptist Church is serving as another new polling location. Parking spots remained hard to come by all morning, lines of cars gridlocked on adjacent roads. A lifelong Floridian, Bill Butler lives down the street. The storms brought high winds, severe rain, and a deadly storm surge that slammed his Ballast Point neighborhood and damaged his house, as well as his typical voting precinct. “They moved us here after all that area was pretty much water,” said Butler.
The church also showed signs of damage: The main building’s windows were encased in plastic tarp and Butler said he suspects the interior had been flooded during Helene.
His experience with the hurricanes further reinforced his decision to vote for former President Trump. “What you like to see is people that are coming to your help as quickly as possible,” he said. “I think that Trump came to the help of a lot of people very quickly because he lives here. He knows what it’s like in Florida. And we’ve been hit pretty hard. I mean, two major hurricanes within two weeks.”
At Temple Beth-El in St. Petersburg, voters have been making their way from across Pinellas County to cast ballots. Mounds of debris still line the streets, and a pocket of storm-ravaged houses encircle the polling location.
Mike Trombley drove down to the site Tuesday afternoon from Seminole after his usual voting place in Treasure Island was decimated by Helene. Trombley has been displaced since the hurricane flooded his house with three and a half feet of water. “We got our asses kicked by Helene,” he said. He’s not sure exactly when he’ll be able to return home. He grappled with the “politicization of information” when casting his ballot. “I don’t know what I should know, and even when I do look it up, it’s like watching TV. You’re going to get a conservative or a liberal slant.”
Tampa resident Bill Butler stands outside of Victory Baptist Church, a temporary polling site for some that shows signs of damage from hurricanes Helene and Milton, including plastic covered windows. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
What Trombley knows for sure is that the outcome of this election will not make much of a difference in how his community rebuilds in the months and years to come. “FEMA is a mess no matter what,” he said.
State Representative Linda Chaney, a Republican from Florida’s 61st district, was also at Temple Beth-El. Chaney, up for re-election, greeted voters in the parking lot. Severe flooding from Helene displaced both her and her 93-year-old mother from their homes.
Devastation from the storm has driven much of Treasure Island’s coastal community from their neighborhoods. Chaney said she expects that many people in the hardest-hit areas will not make it to the polls. People across the state also reported issues with Florida’s online voter resource tool intermittently crashing all morning, keeping an unknown number of people from being able to look up their current polling location.
“The majority of my district got wiped out by the hurricanes,” said Chaney. “Those folks might have a hard time coming to the polls, because they’re kind of busy. They’ve got no home, they’ve got no clothes. And then the polls got changed.” She knows of at least six people who showed up at one St. Petersburg polling location only to discover it wasn’t their new precinct.
Further north, outside of a polling station in Safety Harbor, Florida, Bill and Elizabeth Wadsworth sat in folding chairs, a cooler tucked between them, urging passerby to vote for Harris and Walz. The two considered themselves staunchly Republican until former Trump took office in 2017. Bill served in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War from 1963 to 1970. Elizabeth remembers what it was like to fight for abortion rights in the early 1970s.
“Our youngest granddaughter just turned 21,” she said. She also is worried about the security of the country under another Trump administration. “You think about them and what kind of country they’re going to inherit.” Although Milton and Helene didn’t change their polling location, or their votes, she is aware that many others across the Tampa Bay region are grappling with the voting hurdles and extensive damage left behind by both storms.
“To me, if a person wants to vote, they are going to vote,” she said.
Hello, and welcome to our special Election Day edition of State of Emergency. I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today I’m reporting from rainy Buncombe County, North Carolina. I spent the morning talking to voters at the Fairview Public Library — one of 17 temporary polling sites in the county established after Hurricane Helene caused widespread damage in late September.
North Carolina is one of many states that saw record-breaking early voting in the weeks leading up to Election Day — about 50 percent of registered voters in Buncombe, more than 115,000 people, voted early, and local election officials expect a huge turnout today as well.
“The last four years have been brutal for small business. You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’”
—Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, who said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Polls opened at 6:30 a.m. at Fairview Public Library, with dozens of people streaming in throughout the morning. While most are in the right place, a few voters have accidentally landed in the wrong spot. “This isn’t my location,” one man called to me as he got back into his truck.
Sean Miller, a 26-year-old Democrat who lives in Fairview, lost nearly all of her worldly possessions in Helene, and the road leading out of her community was destroyed. “We were trapped for a week,” she said, stopping to talk to me after she cast her ballot. “And there was a tree in my house.” Miller was able to find her new polling location online once her power came back on.
The storm didn’t change who she planned to vote for, Miller said, but it did deepen her conviction. “I would really like to be able to keep the National Weather Service free and accessible to everyone,” she said, referencing a Project 2025 initiative to privatize federal weather data collection. “Helene didn’t change my opinion, but it made me feel more encouraged to vote to keep basic things like that.”
A sign at the Fairview Public Library polling location in Buncombe County, North Carolina.Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, said he was initially concerned that the hurricane would affect his ability to vote, but he soon received information about this new polling location from the county. But like Miller, one thing the storm didn’t change was Lund’s politics. “The last four years have been brutal for small business,” he said on his way into the library. “You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’” Lund said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Joining me out in the field today are my colleagues Katie Myers, Grist’s reporter embedded at Blue Ridge Public Radio in western North Carolina, and Ayurella Horn-Muller, who is reporting from Florida in communities devastated by both Helene and Hurricane Milton. Check back with Grist later today for our Election Day dispatches on how voters are feeling post-hurricane and the hurdles they’ve faced while trying to vote in the wake of a disaster.
A vulnerable Republican stakes his seat on water
Hi everyone, this is Jake. I’m on the opposite side of the country from Zoya, in California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley, but extreme weather is affecting a critical election on this coast as well. This morning at Grist, I profiled David Valadao, a longtime congressman representing California’s 22nd District and one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House of Representatives, where the GOP has a razor-thin margin of control. Valadao is a former dairy farmer who has staked his political career on support for policies that provide more water for the agricultural industry — even when that means dismissing environmental rules. Valadao’s district has suffered historic drought in the decade since he entered Congress, and local farmers are once again staunchly supporting him this election cycle.
“Whoever’s perceived as being more likely to protect agriculture, or secure existing water deliveries and identify new ones, is going to be rewarded at the ballot box.”
—Tal Eslick, political consultant and former staffer to David Valadao
But the Central Valley is also home to numerous rural communities that don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water, and groups supporting his Democratic opponent, Rudy Salas, are trying to rally these low-income Hispanic communities to vote Valadao out. They’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors in a district that elected Valadao by just over 3,000 votes last time around. The complex tangle of California water politics rarely makes national headlines, but this year it could decide who ends up in control of Congress.
Are climate voters showing up?: The presidential election will likely come down to a few thousand votes in critical battleground states like Georgia. Our Grist colleagues Kate Yoder and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey look at the up-to-the-wire effort by advocacy groups and campaign volunteers to contact registered voters who care about climate change but seldom show up at the polls, urging them to cast their ballots this week. Read more
Big downballot energy races: Just 200 public officials have outsize control over the fate of the nation’s clean energy transition — and many of them are on your ballot this November. Grist reporters Emily Jones and Gautama Mehta present a rundown on the role that state public service commissions play in regulating utilities, and the critical political races voters are deciding this year that could affect clean power deployment. Read more
What the election means for plastic: The United States is one of the world’s top producers of plastic, and the next president could play a make-or-break role in addressing this crisis, according to my Grist colleague Joseph Winters. It will be up to the next administration to decide whether to push for limits on plastic production, as Biden promised to do, or to renege on that commitment and let the industry produce as much as it wants. Read more
Rafael approaches: A tropical storm system called Rafael is forming in the Caribbean Sea and may become a hurricane by later today, Election Day. The storm won’t disrupt the voting process, but it will likely make landfall somewhere around Louisiana this weekend, presenting the lame-duck Biden administration with yet another disaster challenge. Read more
Fury over floods in Spain: Protestors hurled mud at the king and queen of Spain over the weekend during their royal visit to the site of unprecedented flooding in the Valencia region. The disaster killed more than 200 people and sparked outrage from residents, who accused the government of waiting too long to send out emergency alerts. Read more
Hello, and welcome to our special Election Day edition of State of Emergency. I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today I’m reporting from rainy Buncombe County, North Carolina. I spent the morning talking to voters at the Fairview Public Library — one of 17 temporary polling sites in the county established after Hurricane Helene caused widespread damage in late September.
North Carolina is one of many states that saw record-breaking early voting in the weeks leading up to Election Day — about 50 percent of registered voters in Buncombe, more than 115,000 people, voted early, and local election officials expect a huge turnout today as well.
“The last four years have been brutal for small business. You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’”
—Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, who said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Polls opened at 6:30 a.m. at Fairview Public Library, with dozens of people streaming in throughout the morning. While most are in the right place, a few voters have accidentally landed in the wrong spot. “This isn’t my location,” one man called to me as he got back into his truck.
Sean Miller, a 26-year-old Democrat who lives in Fairview, lost nearly all of her worldly possessions in Helene, and the road leading out of her community was destroyed. “We were trapped for a week,” she said, stopping to talk to me after she cast her ballot. “And there was a tree in my house.” Miller was able to find her new polling location online once her power came back on.
The storm didn’t change who she planned to vote for, Miller said, but it did deepen her conviction. “I would really like to be able to keep the National Weather Service free and accessible to everyone,” she said, referencing a Project 2025 initiative to privatize federal weather data collection. “Helene didn’t change my opinion, but it made me feel more encouraged to vote to keep basic things like that.”
A sign at the Fairview Public Library polling location in Buncombe County, North Carolina.Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, said he was initially concerned that the hurricane would affect his ability to vote, but he soon received information about this new polling location from the county. But like Miller, one thing the storm didn’t change was Lund’s politics. “The last four years have been brutal for small business,” he said on his way into the library. “You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’” Lund said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Joining me out in the field today are my colleagues Katie Myers, Grist’s reporter embedded at Blue Ridge Public Radio in western North Carolina, and Ayurella Horn-Muller, who is reporting from Florida in communities devastated by both Helene and Hurricane Milton. Check back with Grist later today for our Election Day dispatches on how voters are feeling post-hurricane and the hurdles they’ve faced while trying to vote in the wake of a disaster.
A vulnerable Republican stakes his seat on water
Hi everyone, this is Jake. I’m on the opposite side of the country from Zoya, in California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley, but extreme weather is affecting a critical election on this coast as well. This morning at Grist, I profiled David Valadao, a longtime congressman representing California’s 22nd District and one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House of Representatives, where the GOP has a razor-thin margin of control. Valadao is a former dairy farmer who has staked his political career on support for policies that provide more water for the agricultural industry — even when that means dismissing environmental rules. Valadao’s district has suffered historic drought in the decade since he entered Congress, and local farmers are once again staunchly supporting him this election cycle.
“Whoever’s perceived as being more likely to protect agriculture, or secure existing water deliveries and identify new ones, is going to be rewarded at the ballot box.”
—Tal Eslick, political consultant and former staffer to David Valadao
But the Central Valley is also home to numerous rural communities that don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water, and groups supporting his Democratic opponent, Rudy Salas, are trying to rally these low-income Hispanic communities to vote Valadao out. They’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors in a district that elected Valadao by just over 3,000 votes last time around. The complex tangle of California water politics rarely makes national headlines, but this year it could decide who ends up in control of Congress.
Are climate voters showing up?: The presidential election will likely come down to a few thousand votes in critical battleground states like Georgia. Our Grist colleagues Kate Yoder and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey look at the up-to-the-wire effort by advocacy groups and campaign volunteers to contact registered voters who care about climate change but seldom show up at the polls, urging them to cast their ballots this week. Read more
Big downballot energy races: Just 200 public officials have outsize control over the fate of the nation’s clean energy transition — and many of them are on your ballot this November. Grist reporters Emily Jones and Gautama Mehta present a rundown on the role that state public service commissions play in regulating utilities, and the critical political races voters are deciding this year that could affect clean power deployment. Read more
What the election means for plastic: The United States is one of the world’s top producers of plastic, and the next president could play a make-or-break role in addressing this crisis, according to my Grist colleague Joseph Winters. It will be up to the next administration to decide whether to push for limits on plastic production, as Biden promised to do, or to renege on that commitment and let the industry produce as much as it wants. Read more
Rafael approaches: A tropical storm system called Rafael is forming in the Caribbean Sea and may become a hurricane by later today, Election Day. The storm won’t disrupt the voting process, but it will likely make landfall somewhere around Louisiana this weekend, presenting the lame-duck Biden administration with yet another disaster challenge. Read more
Fury over floods in Spain: Protestors hurled mud at the king and queen of Spain over the weekend during their royal visit to the site of unprecedented flooding in the Valencia region. The disaster killed more than 200 people and sparked outrage from residents, who accused the government of waiting too long to send out emergency alerts. Read more
It’s been a little over a month since Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, claiming hundreds of lives and causing an estimated $53 billion dollars in damages. In addition to being a record-breaking storm in its own right, Helene was also the first hurricane in American history to hit two battleground states within weeks of a major election. In North Carolina…
It’s been a little over a month since Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, claiming hundreds of lives and causing an estimated $53 billion dollars in damages. In addition to being a record-breaking storm in its own right, Helene was also the first hurricane in American history to hit two battleground states within weeks of a major election.
In North Carolina, one of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential race this week, Helene’s destruction displaced thousands of people, caused hundreds of road closures, and disrupted mail just weeks before early voting in the state began. More than 20 post offices were still redirecting mail as of October 22.
North Carolina’s election board quickly took action to ensure people affected by the storm maintained their right to vote, approving a resolution to extend early voting deadlines and loosen some restrictions around absentee ballots, among other actions, in the 13 western counties impacted most severely by Helene. Despite these measures, a question still loomed: Would the storm dampen voter turnout?
As early voting wraps up, data being released by local officials in Helene’s path indicate that voter enthusiasm has not waned. Indeed, an inverse trend may be under way. North Carolina and Georgia, the other battleground state affected by Helene, have reported record-breaking early voting numbers: Voter turnout has surpassed 2012, 2016, and, in North Carolina, 2020 — a pandemic election year when many people were voting early to avoid crowds.
“It looks like even the western North Carolina counties that were most affected by Hurricane Helene do not have massively lower early voter turnout rates,” said Jowei Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan who studies redistricting and political geography. “It’s possible that the conveniences of mail-in voting and early voting have mitigated the potentially negative effects of the hurricane on voters.”
Chen noted that while displaced voters can request a mail-in ballot sent to their new, temporary residences, it’s inevitable that some of these hurricane victims will fall through the cracks as they deal with the logistics and mental burden of disaster recovery.
The high turnout in North Carolina and Georgia is a testament to the stakes of this election, widely viewed as among the most consequential of the 21st century, as well as the Republican party’s embrace of early voting this cycle. But election officials’ response to Hurricane Helene has also opened up new avenues for affected and displaced voters to participate. Disaster researchers say that the federal and state disaster relief process itself is likely influencing both how voters show up to vote and who they vote for.
A poll worker directs residents for early voting on October 17, 2024 in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
In Avery County, North Carolina, the Roaring Creek, Ingalls, and Plumtree voting sites, which were damaged by the storm, were consolidated into Riverside Elementary School. In the middle of the day on Thursday, poll workers sat eating lunch as teachers went in and out of the school picking up supplies to deliver to struggling areas around the county. Though the day had been slow, workers said they’d seen between 600 and 700 people cast their ballots already that week — larger, they said, than previous years.
One county over, in hard-hit Spruce Pine, the largest town in heavily-Republican Mitchell County, about a dozen early voters pulled up to the volunteer fire department to cast their ballots over the course of an hour. The site, which is downtown and surrounded by wide, well-paved roads and parking lots, remains easily accessible. One voter, who gave her name as Lauren, said it was easier to vote early than to wait for Election Day, since she owned a campground affected by the flooding and had cleanup work to do.
Past research has shown that a hurricane can both suppress and galvanize voters. An otherwise politically engaged person who has had his or her home destroyed in a major disaster might deprioritize casting a ballot in favor of prioritizing something else more pressing, such as rebuilding their home.
On the other hand, voters who received federal aid or some other kind of kickback following a storm might be more inclined to vote, and, some studies show, vote for the incumbent party (the party responsible for delivering that kickback). Research also shows that people who did not receive sufficient help from the government are similarly inclined to vote, but for the challenging party.
James Robinson, a welder casting his ballot at the Spruce Pine polling center on Thursday, said he was a Trump voter before the hurricane and he would be one after. Robinson sustained home damage from Helene. He didn’t lose everything, like some did, but the experience reaffirmed his beliefs. “The government response here was pathetic,” Robinson said, citing what he said was a slow response, as he and his neighbors cut themselves out of their own driveways.
Thirty miles away, in Madison County, a majority-Republican area not far from Asheville, Francine, a 67-year-old small business owner who asked for her last name to be withheld, has been a registered voter for 10 years. Her house wasn’t badly damaged by Helene, but many of her neighbors’ homes and businesses, and her town’s infrastructure, were destroyed. “You go a few miles in any direction and it’s just terrible,” she said.
Days before the storm hit, Francine woke up in the middle of the night with a gastrointestinal obstruction and spent eight days in the hospital recovering. When she was discharged, she came home and noticed that she hadn’t received her voter registration card in the mail, but that her husband had. Over the course of the past year, North Carolina has removed nearly 750,000 registrants in an effort to flush duplicates, the deceased, and other ineligible voters from its voter rolls. Francine wondered if she had accidentally been counted among them. But she wasn’t well enough yet to drive to the election office to sort it out. The day she was due to get her sutures removed, Hurricane Helene hit. Francine’s husband removed the stitches himself as the storm raged around them.
Two weeks ago, Francine was finally able to drive to her local election office and prove to the officer that an error on her recently renewed driver’s license had led her registration to be improperly purged by the state. She cast her vote early last week for Kamala Harris, and was surprised by how many people she saw voting early as well.
Francine’s top issues are women’s rights, separation of church and state, and U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad. She wasn’t happy with either candidate, but she said she couldn’t stomach voting for Trump. The former president’s response to the hurricane, which poured gasoline on the fire of false rumors and conspiracy theories that cropped up after the storm, further soured her on his candidacy. “Everybody is pointing fingers at each other and it’s just getting really ugly,” she said. “Everybody is so worked up I think the turnout is going to be big.”
Brittany Powell moved from the Bay Area to Vermont in 2016, just as wildfire smoke was becoming a regular summertime occurrence in California. She watched in horror from afar as friends and family living in her home state fled wildfires made larger and more intense by climate change-driven drought.
“You’re so lucky you live there,” they told her. Powell thought so, too. The Northeast tends to have big summer thunderstorms and frigid winters, but it’s rarely beset by hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes — the cataclysmic natural disasters other parts of the country have to navigate regularly. And, unlike nearby New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — states where acreage is a hot commodity — Vermont, the most rural state in the U.S., has ample open space.
After renting for a few years, Powell and her husband bought an old farmhouse just outside of the state capital Montpelier in 2019. Their town is known for its dirt roads, spring-fed wells, and old-school New England appeal. When she moved there, Powell remembers thinking that it was the closest thing she’d be able to find to a place safe from the effects of climate change.
Soon, Powell would be dealing with a set of issues reminiscent of the state she had left behind.
In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading across the country and many people began working from home, middle- and upper-class Americans started trading dense urban areas for rural ones. Vermont towns whose populations hadn’t changed in a hundred years, towns that the state was desperate to fill before 2020, were startled by an influx of new residents. Abandoned houses were quickly sold, renovated, and resold. The state’s housing stock was thoroughly gleaned, and the cost of housing increased close to 40 percent between 2019 and 2023.
As affordable housing became nearly impossible to come by, the homeless population grew. There were rumors of traveling nurses forced to sleep in tents near the hospitals they were treating COVID patients in. Some companies hiring out-of-state applicants gave their new employees 12 months to move to the state, to account for the difficult housing market.
And then, last July, heavy rain started to fall on central Vermont — and kept falling. Flash floods swept across the state. Trickling rivers roared to life, swelled, and burst into the towns and cities clustered by their banks. More than 12 inches of rain fell on Montpelier that month, breaking a rainfall record set in 1989. The Winooski River, the artery that runs through the capital, crested to its highest point in close to a century.
At 7 p.m. on the night of July 10, as rain poured, Powell and her husband checked their basement and saw that it was dry. Twenty minutes later, there was three feet of water in it. They didn’t know it yet, but the road drainage culvert above their house had failed, sending a wave of water onto their property. They were soon plunged into darkness, as thousands of customers in their area lost power. When the sun came up and the flooding had receded, 6 inches of mud lined the floors of their basement. Even with help from their coworkers, friends, and neighbors, it took the couple weeks to clean it out. The flooding ruined their HVAC system and required $25,000 in repairs. Powell’s house wasn’t in a flood plain, so she hadn’t bought flood insurance. But after months of filling out paperwork, she got reimbursement from federal disaster relief programs.
The Powells’ basement in 2023. Brittany Powell
On July 10 this year, a year later to the day, another bout of heavy rain flooded Powell’s house again. The damage was just as bad the second time. The couple considered moving, but quickly realized that the real estate market had changed drastically since they’d purchased their house in 2019. The cost of buying a new home aside, Powell, like many of her fellow climate-conscious Vermonters, doesn’t know where she would go. “We thought we were in this climate change haven,” she said. “Then you realize that that doesn’t really exist.”
Listen to former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris stump on the campaign trail, and they’ll tell you that America has a housing crisis of epic proportions. It’s one of the only issues Republicans and Democrats in Congress agree needs to be fixed, and fast.
The problem dates back to 2008, when the Great Recession caused real estate developers to cut back dramatically on the number of new homes they were building. The rate of new homes coming online has lagged ever since, adding up to a deficit of 3.8 million housing units across the country as of 2020.
What’s more, many of the cities where Americans want to live have strict zoning laws on the books that restrict new developments and stifle the constriction of multi-family homes in particular. Even as states have tried to make it easier for developers to build new homes, local governments and residents have conspired to stop the flow of new housing. Meanwhile, as everything has become more expensive over the past half-decade, the cost of building new homes has skyrocketed.
Now, extreme weather events are squeezing already-limited housing options. Climate change-driven disasters have been hitting the U.S. with more intensity over the past quarter-century, creating tens of billions of dollars worth of damage every year, as global average temperatures climb. Last year, 2.5 million Americans were displaced, either temporarily or permanently, by extreme weather. And much of America’s existing housing stock is not built to withstand the consequences of climate change, which means that tens of millions of renters and homeowners are vulnerable.
Climate change isn’t the root cause of America’s housing crisis, but it is an erratic compounding factor that officials from the smallest towns in New England to the biggest cities in California are being forced to reckon with. This summer alone, Hurricanes Helene and Milton temporarily displaced millions of people across the South and caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure, businesses, and properties.
A year out from the devastating flood of 2023, which killed two people and damaged 4,800 homes and businesses, Vermonters are confronting the difficult reality that extreme weather is shoving the state deeper into a housing deficit. Vermont’s historic downtowns, clustered along the rivers that once served as vital transportation corridors and provided power for mills and factories, are being drowned by the very arteries that once gave them life. “People want to stay in the community, but there’s a close to 0 percent vacancy rate,” said Lauren Hierl, a nonpartisan member of the Montpelier City Council. “When you have an event like the flood come in that takes offline even 50 units, there’s just nowhere for people to go.”
A destroyed property in Barre, a town near Montpelier that endured the worst flooding in the region in 2023 and was hit by another flood in 2024. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
A recent report conducted by Vermont housing officials found that Vermont needs to build between 24,000 and 36,000 new homes by 2029 to accommodate its growing population. The cost of building a small home or apartment rose from $370,000 in 2022 to $500,000 a year later. Half of renters in the state spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing — widely considered the threshold between affordable and unaffordable.
Seth Bongartz, a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives, sees the housing shortage in his state as a “little microcosm” of larger national housing and climate trends. Bongartz recently introduced a bill that makes it easier for Vermont municipalities to approve new housing developments in the state’s most populated areas, the idea being that building denser housing where amenities like gas, water, and sewage already exist simultaneously expands housing stock and prevents sprawl into the state’s revered wilderness. The state’s Republican governor vetoed the bill, but Democratic majorities in the state legislature overrode him, and the law was enacted in June. The loosened restrictions will help jumpstart more development, Bongartz said: “It’s coming.” But so are more floods.
In Vermont’s capital, city leaders, nonprofits, business associations, and tourism boards are trying to take on the city’s twin housing and climate crises. And they’re doing it with community input. A series of public meetings held in the months after the 2023 floods, attended by hundreds of concerned residents, spurred the development of a new commission dedicated to figuring out how to protect the city from the effects of climate change. Working alongside the city council, the coalition is racing against the clock to make Montpelier more resilient before the next heavy rainstorm.
The Vermont State House in Montpelier. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
To the passing leaf peeper, hiker, or skier, Montpelier, the smallest state capital in the U.S., is the picture of Vermont charm. Brick houses line the Winooski River, which runs parallel to Main Street. Small businesses sling lattes, pizzas, and secondhand flannels. The gold-domed capitol building, on State Street, stands sentinel over a city that’s home to just 8,000 residents.
But things have changed since the event the National Weather Service dubbed the Great Vermont Flood of 2023. Close to 100 buildings in the capital, many of them businesses, were damaged. Some shops never reopened, and the ones that did are struggling to recoup losses from closures forced by the disaster. The only federal post office in Montpelier has been shuttered for more than a year, meaning that residents of Vermont’s capital city have to go to a nearby town to mail their packages. On the far side of State Street, a mother is still camping out with her two teenage sons in the shell of their former house. A small number of houses have been abandoned permanently — their owners are in the process of getting buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, the federal government’s disaster relief arm.
To those in the know, it’s obvious that the floods sparked the beginning of a precarious new era in Montpelier, one that has not yet come into full focus.
Melissa Whittaker and her husband, Carlo, own a pizza restaurant called Positive Pie in downtown Montpelier. On the morning of July 10, 2023, water started rushing into their basement faster than they had ever seen — and soon, into the first floor, too. Keeping the water out was futile; they had to close the restaurant and speed home before the roads washed out. When they came back the next morning, Positive Pie was utterly wrecked. Prosciutto and mozzarella were scattered on the floor in indistinguishable black piles. In the basement, the wall separating their building from the neighboring building had been blown into bits by the force of the water. Gobs of pizza dough hung like stalactites from the rafters.
Positive Pie a few days after flooding destroyed everything inside of the restaurant in July 2023.Melissa Whittaker
Melissa Whittaker sits in front of Positive Pie in September 2024.Zoya Teirstein / Grist
The federal flood insurance they had only covered the first floor of the restaurant — the national flood insurance program doesn’t cover basements in flood zones. In order to reopen the restaurant, they needed new floors, walls, plumbing, electric wiring, and a mezzanine steel loft to store the goods they had previously kept downstairs. The upgrades and repairs cost them $800,000 over the course of more than 12 months. Melissa and Carlo got a little over $100,000 from their insurance company and $200,000 from a Vermont state business assistance program.
They applied for a small business loan from the federal government to cover the remaining $500,000. The money came with an unthinkable price: their house as collateral. “If we go bankrupt, we lose everything,” Melissa said.
Melissa and Carlo aren’t the only homeowners in central Vermont who are one disaster away from homelessness. After more floods hit the region this summer, city and state leaders are desperately trying to find answers to a question thousands of other American communities, from Florida to North Carolina to California, are also struggling to address: How do you help affected citizens in the short term and prepare for next year at the same time? Two projects underway in Montpelier hint at the magnitude of the challenge ahead.
Ben Doyle is president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, a nonprofit organization that works to safeguard old buildings and other heirlooms of Vermont’s long history. In his spare time, he volunteers on the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience — an agency that was created after the flooding last year at the urging of Montpelier residents. Since he began volunteering, the commission has taken up just about every spare minute he has. “I can’t coach basketball,” he told me on a drive around Montpelier in September. “But I can do this.”
Ben Doyle in front of the house that belonged to the founding family of Montpelier. It’ll soon be demolished to make way for floodwater. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
The Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience was born of a series of well-attended public meetings, organized by three local organizations, that took place in the months following the 2023 flood. Paul Costello, a local with an uncanny knack for mediating tough conversations, led the discussions. The conversations were focused on climate resilience, Costello told me: how to build better communications and early warning systems ahead of disastrous floods; whether the city’s water treatment facility, which almost flooded, needs to be hardened; and, crucially, how to direct water away from houses and businesses downtown.
Many of the roughly 1,000 people who attended the meetings had just lived through their first climate-driven disaster and were struggling to navigate the slow, bureaucratic, and confusing federal disaster relief process. Less than 2 percent of Vermonters had flood insurance before the floods hit.
The effect of the flooding on the state’s housing stock was a hot topic at the public meetings. People who had never considered moving before started looking around for new places to live and were startled, like Brittany Powell was, to discover that there was virtually no affordable real estate to be found in the entire state. Addressing the multifaceted problems driving the housing shortage in Montpelier, Costello said, wasn’t something the meetings were aimed at fixing, but the issue was inescapable. “It weaves through everything in our community,” he said.
At the last of the meetings, more than 300 people crowded into the auditorium of the local High School. Its basement had been steeped in four feet of water just months prior. Attendees were given six blue stickers, which they could put on more than a dozen resilience projects they had come up with over the course of the previous two meetings. The most popular initiatives fell into three buckets: establishing an emergency response system, restoring the floodplain, and creating a more resilient downtown. Soon after, the city, in collaboration with two local nonprofits, officially established the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience, a group of 14 volunteers and one paid executive director, which would be tasked with working in parallel with the city to accomplish the goals the community put forth.
For the past year, Doyle has been trying to make one of the most important of those directives — establish areas that can serve as giant sponges for flood water around Montpelier — happen. The project that’s closest to coming to fruition is called 5 Home Farm Way, an 18-acre parcel and the site of a historic home owned by the founding family of Montpelier. Doyle took me to the site, which the Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the resilience commission and the city, aims to turn into a natural containment area that can hold water that would otherwise flow from the Winooski River into Montpelier during a flood event. If the Great Vermont Flood hadn’t happened, the decrepit house on the property might have been turned into a museum or the headquarters for a nonprofit. But after the rain fell last summer, Doyle — who had dedicated his career to historical preservation — knew the house had to go. “The idea of more public investment going into a building that is no longer sustainable because of climate change is a bad idea,” he said.
Removing the house and creating a channel connecting the property to the Winooski river will take roughly two years, Doyle said, and the engineering studies haven’t been completed yet, which means that no one knows exactly how much flooding in Montpelier will be averted by the project. But once it’s done, 5 Home Farm Way will serve as natural flood protection for the town, hopefully preventing more homes from being destroyed in future years. “The idea behind it is that maybe it drops the floodwater in Montpelier down by six inches,” he said.
One of the abandoned houses on State Street in Montpelier. The owners of the house are negotiating a buyout with FEMA.Zoya Teirstein/Grist
A house along the river in downtown Montpelier that looks occupied but has been abandoned for more than a year. There are many such houses in the city. Zoya Teirstein/Grist
Still, Doyle knows the scale of the flooding to come can’t be stopped by a single, 18-acre parcel. “There’s a bunch of other parcels in this region that if you could coordinate them all and have it all be floodplain restoration you’re starting to actually do something,” he said. “But it’s going to take like 20 of these projects to make a difference. That’s tens of millions of dollars and decades of work.”
Right across the street from 5 Home Farm Way, the city is embarking on a project that tackles Montpelier’s climate and housing predicament from the other direction. There, the local government is building a new affordable housing development on the site of an old golf course formerly owned by a fraternal social club called The Elks. For years, the Montpelier City Council hoped developers would buy the vacant property and turn it into an affordable apartment complex — something Montpelier desperately needed even before the floods hit. But there was little appetite among developers for such a project in Montpelier, said Hierl, the city council member. Developers were more interested in building more lucrative single-family condos in Stowe and other areas of Vermont where wealthy people tend to buy expensive second homes.
So in 2022, the city took matters into its own hands, purchasing the 138-acre property with a $2 million bond with plans to turn it into a recreational site and a housing development. “We felt like we needed to take a more active stance, as our local government, because housing is such a crisis,” Hierl said. “We need to be proactive.” After the floods hit Montpelier and dozens of houses by the river were inundated, Hierl and other members of the council realized just how important their investment was.
The former Elks Club building. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
The former Elks Club is located just a few miles from downtown, but it’s a world away in elevation, located at the top of a hill that’s never been touched by flooding. The aim is to eventually build approximately 300 units of housing on the site, which would significantly alleviate the housing shortage in Montpelier. But there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before the city can break ground. The property still needs sewage, water, and electricity lines put in. It needs a road with two exit points, per Vermont state law. It also needs a developer on board to cover most of the upfront costs of building. The city has $500,000 in FEMA funds to use, left over from 2023, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Hierl estimates it’ll be three years before the city breaks ground on the project, and a couple years after that before the new housing comes on the market. Still, she said, the simple reality is that there is no one else in Montpelier committed to providing affordable housing opportunities for residents.
“In some of the towns in Vermont that are successful in the development of new housing units, it’s often taken an intervention from the municipality to make it happen,” said Doyle, standing in front of the old Elks Club and looking out over the acres of sloping lawn that surround it. “Some people don’t believe that’s the role of government, helping facilitate the development of affordable housing. And yet, if the city didn’t step in, that’s not what would’ve happened here.”
It’s one thing for a city like Montpelier to take steps toward building a single affordable housing development, but it’s quite another to build enough affordable, climate-resilient housing to meet the need across Vermont — and across the country. Alex Farrell, Vermont’s top housing official and a Republican, said that, while Vermont has made strides in becoming more climate resilient, he doesn’t know how his state will address the toll extreme weather is taking on housing across Vermont without outside help. “To ask states to take this on alone, it’s just not doable,” he said.
This year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, both Democrats, introduced a bill that would create a $30 billion social housing authority within the federal government aimed at financing affordable units across the U.S. The bill pulls from green housing legislation that AOC and Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, introduced in 2019 that would have directed billions toward making existing public housing stock climate resilient, had it passed.
The new legislation is a long shot — congressional Republicans want less social safety net spending, not more. And record-high inflation has led to a situation in which new federal spending, in general, is increasingly frowned upon by voters who will be casting ballots this fall. But in Vermont, where extreme weather events are just starting to affect communities, local and state officials — both Democratic and Republican — say out-of-the-box thinking is exactly what’s needed.
“It’s not like this kind of disaster is a one-off thing that’s really unusual or that we might not see again,” said Hierl. “Our federal, our state, and our local government all need to be better equipped to help people through these challenging climate disasters that we know are just going to continue growing. We need to do better.”
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and again: Despite what the science says, climate change does not rank high among Americans’ priorities in the ballot box. When we launched this series in August, however, we made the case that climate disasters can influence voting and elections — not just locally, but nationally. We’ve just seen proof of that in Hurricane Helene.
Two weeks ago, the Category 4 storm carved a deadly path through the U.S. Southeast — the first time in American history that a major disaster has hit two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks ahead of a presidential election.
“Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
— Rachel Goldwasser, Southern Poverty Law Center
On social media and on trips to the disaster zone, former President Donald Trump has made one bogus claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely alleging that President Joe Biden has been ignoring federal aid requests from Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, and that the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically — spent FEMA money on housing for illegal immigrants.
Trump proxies like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped fuel a veritable deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, include a barrage of claims that FEMA is confiscating community-donated supplies. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X last week, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government aimed the hurricane at Republican counties in order to swing the presidential election.
“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
The online conspiracies have real-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal aid efforts are drowning out real information people in western North Carolina and other ravaged states need in order to begin the recovery process, and false claims about government malfeasance are galvanizing far-right militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Roxanne Brooks mounts an American flag to a stack of cinderblocks outside her friend’s destroyed mobile home (at right) in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding in Swannanoa, North Carolina.Mario Tama / Getty Images
Meanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are racing to figure out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling locations are shut down, and the U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver mail-in ballots to multiple ZIP codes because of washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top election officials, said last week.
On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to loosen voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early-voting processes, establish more voting sites, and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.
“Early voting may look different in some of the 13 hardest-hit counties, but it will go on,” Brinson Bell told reporters. Read the full story on how Helene could impact voting in North Carolina.
Milton approaches
“There are no good scenarios.”
— Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist for WFLA, Tampa Bay’s NBC affiliate
Hurricane Milton exploded to Category 5 intensity yesterday as it barreled eastward across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s precise track is still unclear, but the majority of models predict it will make landfall tomorrow in or near Tampa Bay, one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane storm surge. The city hasn’t seen a direct hit from a hurricane in a century, but if Milton lands in the wrong spot, the bay would act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, pushing a huge wall of water into the heart of one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
Hurricane Milton at 16:30 on Monday, October 7, 2024.CIRA / NOAA
To make matters worse, coastal communities in western Florida are still emerging from post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris are strewn along roadways, flooded residents are mucking out their houses, and FEMA is just starting to distribute displacement assistance to the victims of last month’s storm. Governor Ron DeSantis last week sent many of the state’s rescue and repair crews up to North Carolina to aid in the disaster response there, but he recalled those crews over the weekend and is now pushing to clean up as much debris as possible before Milton makes landfall.
My colleague Matt Simon has more on how Milton gained strength so fast — read the full story here.
— Jake Bittle
What we’re reading
Presidential candidates flex their disaster chops: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both visited areas affected by Hurricane Helene last week, with Trump touring damaged areas in Valdosta, Georgia, and Harris surveying a destroyed town in North Carolina. Each candidate accused the other of not doing enough to help storm victims. Read more
FEMA is out of money: President Joe Biden over the weekend urged Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill replenishing FEMA’s drained disaster relief fund. The agency has said it lacks the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he wouldn’t commit to calling lawmakers back. Read more
Helene and manufactured housing: When Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend, it struck a region where a large portion of the housing stock consists of mobile and manufactured homes, which are extremely vulnerable to wind and flood damage. These homes, which aren’t subject to local building codes, are a last resort for residents who can’t find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards. Read more
Who’s going to pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that loss will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t carry additional flood insurance. Read more
A word from Al Gore: My colleague Kate Yoder sat down with former vice president Al Gore at Climate Week to get his thoughts on where we stand in the climate fight. The Inconvenient Truth creator, who lost the 2000 election by a hair, said even he has been surprised by how difficult it has been to make climate progress, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby. Read more
DeSantis is dodging Harris: As Category 5 Hurricane Milton draws near Tampa, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging Vice President Kamala Harris’s calls about storm recovery in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice chose not to meet last week with President Joe Biden, who was in Florida surveying the damage. Read more
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and again: Despite what the science says, climate change does not rank high among Americans’ priorities in the ballot box. When we launched this series in August, however, we made the case that climate disasters can influence voting and elections — not just locally, but nationally. We’ve just seen proof of that in Hurricane Helene.
Two weeks ago, the Category 4 storm carved a deadly path through the U.S. Southeast — the first time in American history that a major disaster has hit two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks ahead of a presidential election.
“Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
— Rachel Goldwasser, Southern Poverty Law Center
On social media and on trips to the disaster zone, former President Donald Trump has made one bogus claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely alleging that President Joe Biden has been ignoring federal aid requests from Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, and that the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically — spent FEMA money on housing for illegal immigrants.
Trump proxies like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped fuel a veritable deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, include a barrage of claims that FEMA is confiscating community-donated supplies. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X last week, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government aimed the hurricane at Republican counties in order to swing the presidential election.
“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
The online conspiracies have real-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal aid efforts are drowning out real information people in western North Carolina and other ravaged states need in order to begin the recovery process, and false claims about government malfeasance are galvanizing far-right militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Roxanne Brooks mounts an American flag to a stack of cinderblocks outside her friend’s destroyed mobile home (at right) in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding in Swannanoa, North Carolina.Mario Tama / Getty Images
Meanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are racing to figure out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling locations are shut down, and the U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver mail-in ballots to multiple ZIP codes because of washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top election officials, said last week.
On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to loosen voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early-voting processes, establish more voting sites, and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.
“Early voting may look different in some of the 13 hardest-hit counties, but it will go on,” Brinson Bell told reporters. Read the full story on how Helene could impact voting in North Carolina.
Milton approaches
“There are no good scenarios.”
— Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist for WFLA, Tampa Bay’s NBC affiliate
Hurricane Milton exploded to Category 5 intensity yesterday as it barreled eastward across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s precise track is still unclear, but the majority of models predict it will make landfall tomorrow in or near Tampa Bay, one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane storm surge. The city hasn’t seen a direct hit from a hurricane in a century, but if Milton lands in the wrong spot, the bay would act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, pushing a huge wall of water into the heart of one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
Hurricane Milton at 16:30 on Monday, October 7, 2024.CIRA / NOAA
To make matters worse, coastal communities in western Florida are still emerging from post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris are strewn along roadways, flooded residents are mucking out their houses, and FEMA is just starting to distribute displacement assistance to the victims of last month’s storm. Governor Ron DeSantis last week sent many of the state’s rescue and repair crews up to North Carolina to aid in the disaster response there, but he recalled those crews over the weekend and is now pushing to clean up as much debris as possible before Milton makes landfall.
My colleague Matt Simon has more on how Milton gained strength so fast — read the full story here.
— Jake Bittle
What we’re reading
Presidential candidates flex their disaster chops: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both visited areas affected by Hurricane Helene last week, with Trump touring damaged areas in Valdosta, Georgia, and Harris surveying a destroyed town in North Carolina. Each candidate accused the other of not doing enough to help storm victims. Read more
FEMA is out of money: President Joe Biden over the weekend urged Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill replenishing FEMA’s drained disaster relief fund. The agency has said it lacks the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he wouldn’t commit to calling lawmakers back. Read more
Helene and manufactured housing: When Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend, it struck a region where a large portion of the housing stock consists of mobile and manufactured homes, which are extremely vulnerable to wind and flood damage. These homes, which aren’t subject to local building codes, are a last resort for residents who can’t find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards. Read more
Who’s going to pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that loss will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t carry additional flood insurance. Read more
A word from Al Gore: My colleague Kate Yoder sat down with former vice president Al Gore at Climate Week to get his thoughts on where we stand in the climate fight. The Inconvenient Truth creator, who lost the 2000 election by a hair, said even he has been surprised by how difficult it has been to make climate progress, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby. Read more
DeSantis is dodging Harris: As Category 5 Hurricane Milton draws near Tampa, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging Vice President Kamala Harris’s calls about storm recovery in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice chose not to meet last week with President Joe Biden, who was in Florida surveying the damage. Read more
This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics.
The conspiracy theories started swirling even as the flood waters were rising: Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, was created specifically to target Trump voters in crucial swing states. “Yes they can control the weather,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, posted on X on Thursday. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, best known for insisting the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, released a video on X claiming the government aimed Helene at North Carolina. Why? To force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy. The video gleaned nearly a million views in three days.
Hundreds of keyboard conspiracists have taken to TikTok, X, Reddit, and other social media sites to say the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, is withholding critical supplies from stranded communities across the Southeast. “Just got down from the mountains delivering supplies,” someone with the username “RastaGuerilla” posted on X on September 30. “As crazy as it sounds FEMA is directly confiscating donated items and blocking volunteers from helping, kicking churches out of parking lots, etc.” The post received tens of thousands of likes, and similar messages from people claiming they were in the disaster zone have been racking up hundreds of thousands of views and reposts.
Search and rescue teams hike along the Broad River where North Carolina Route 9 used to be, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 2, 2024 near Chimney Rock, North Carolina.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
There’s no saying what percentage of these bogus claims came from people actually in the areas devastated by Helene, let alone whether humans or bots spewed them. Regardless of who or what wrote them, the conspiracies are patently untrue. FEMA is not confiscating supplies. The Biden administration is not trying to kick people off of land it wants to mine for lithium. And the federal government most certainly cannot control the weather. To disaster researchers, the barrage of pointed conspiracies are further proof that conspiratorial thinking is becoming something of an epidemic.
“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
Disasters invariably kick up a cloud of conspiracies aimed at casting doubt on government’s legitimacy — the dark corners of society have long typecast FEMA as a sinister, all-powerful boogeyman capable of the most outlandish and fiendish deeds. During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracists alleged that it was seizing medical supplies from hospitals and local governments. Similar rumors about FEMA and the Red Cross confiscating donations in Lahaina ricocheted around the internet after the devastating wildfire in Hawaii last year.
But experts told Grist that the storm’s proximity to Election Day has produced a toxic stew of conspiracies that reflect broader conversations about immigration, workplace inclusivity, and other hot-button issues that Republicans and conservative news outlets have sought to turn into cultural referendums ahead of November 5.
Debris is seen in front of a home with a Trump 2024 campaign sign in Lake Lure, North Carolina, October 2, 2024, after the passage of Hurricane Helene.
Allison Joyce / AFP
One popular theory littering online forums alleges that the government had directed money away from FEMA to fund programs for illegal immigrants. “FEMA spending over a billion dollars on illegals while they leave Americans stranded and without help is treasonous,” Tim Burchett, a Republican representative from Tennessee, said on X, without citing evidence. Another theory says the agency had prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, training over disaster preparedness. Immigration, and to a lesser extent DEI, are the heart of former president Donald Trump’s re-election platform. (The former president took to Truth Social on Thursday to decry the Biden Administration’s response as “the worst and most incompetently managed ‘storm,’ at the federal level,” before adding, “but their management of the border is worse!”)
“There was already a discourse around these issues and clearly there’s already people who are very concerned about them,” said Samantha Penta, a sociologist and expert on emergency management and homeland security at the University of Albany. “I’m not surprised that those concerns are being integrated into the discussion around Helene response.”
Some of the theories reflect some tiny facet of the truth. In his video, Jones cited a real government program from the 1960s called Project Stormfury as proof that the government had purposefully “seeded” the storm. The program, which explored the possibility of diminishing a hurricane’s strength by seeding it with silver iodide, ended in 1983.
Conspiracies alleging that FEMA is both absent from disaster relief efforts and confiscating supplies also contain a shred of truth based on a pervasive misconception of the role the agency plays in disaster relief. Many people believe it descends on a location with cases of water and pallets of food and armies of people armed with shovels and flashlights immediately after a disaster. But it is better described as a logistics coordination and check-writing organization. “You will never see someone in a FEMA jacket putting sandbags by a river bed,” Penta said. “That is not their job.”
One of its primary roles is to coordinate relief efforts and supply distribution with local and state officials and nonprofit agencies. FEMA typically discourages people from sending supplies or going into a disaster zone, not because it wants to keep aid from the people who need it, but because all those items and untrained volunteers simply get in the way and slow down relief efforts. That’s why states often echo FEMA’s calls to stay out of harm’s way and leave recovery efforts to those who know what they’re doing.
“The State of North Carolina is advising everyone NOT to travel into the affected region,” the North Carolina Business Emergency Operations Center said in an email on Thursday. “We have live communications and power cables on roadways providing essential resources to affected communities that must not be disturbed. We also have roadways uncleared.”
The federal Department of Transportation has placed temporary flight restrictions over parts of the southeast to prevent amateur drone operators and others from impeding rescue efforts, providing further fodder for those who insist the federal government is conspiring to prevent Good Samaritans from helping people in need. “Do not fly your drone near or around rescue and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene,” the agency said in a post on X on Wednesday. “Interfering with emergency response operations impacts search and rescue operations on the ground.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris, alongside Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, speaks after she surveyed the damage from Hurricane Helene in the Meadowbrook neighborhood of Augusta, Georgia, on October 2, 2024.Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Former U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to leave after visiting Chez What Furniture store that was damaged during Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Valdosta, Georgia.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the storm, which laid waste to a wide swath of six states, many people — particularly those in remote areas or those entirely cut off by flooding — were left to fend for themselves.
Joshua Hensley, an entrepreneur who lives in Asheville, has been driving across western North Carolina delivering supplies. “Most of the government involvement we’ve seen are Ospreys and helicopters flying over trying to get stuff in and trying to evacuate people,” he told Grist on Thursday via a starlink satellite hotspot. “But as far as on the ground, I’ve been all over the place and it is almost entirely local.”
In the days before federal aid arrived, restaurants, breweries, and other establishments in Asheville took to providing water, medical care, and other assistance to residents. “All the employees and community members have been volunteering their time and energy,” said Mae Walker, a serviceworker who lives in the city. “Much more than any visible assistance from police or other city officials outside of power restoration.”
In the days following the storm, local pilots used the airport in Asheville as a distribution center to shuttle supplies to stranded communities and conduct search and rescue operations. But as the state and federal government’s vast disaster relief apparatus groaned into motion, their efforts became more of a hindrance than a help, and airport officials asked them to stop as the state took over such operations.
The misconception that the government is not responding to a disaster, and the bogus conspiracy theories that amplify such ideas, can have dangerous implications. The Southern Policy Law Center has heard credible reports that far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance — and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.
“The more people who believe that FEMA isn’t there, or that FEMA spent all its money on DEI or whatever, the more groups like militias believe they’re needed in those areas,” Goldwasser said. “They have their own agendas and goals that they’re trying to meet that supersede the needs of the people on the ground who need help.”
It’s easy to see how, in the chaotic hours and days after a disaster, people might think the government has abandoned residents of the afflicted areas. But the conspiracy theories sprouting up online, and the politicians and pundits cultivating their spread, obfuscate the truth, which is that disaster relief work is messy and, yes, often flawed. “FEMA is an institution built and run by humans,” Penta said. “It’s going to make mistakes and things are going to go poorly and they will get criticism for that.”
Such criticism is fair, even warranted. FEMA has been chronically underfunded for decades, a situation that will only grow worse as climate-fueled disasters become more common, more devastating, and more costly. Compounding the problem is the deepening polarization of American society, and a willingness by many people to see only the worst in the government and the people who work within it. The confluence of these two trends creates the fertile ground that allows conspiracy theories to flourish — and suggests that the flood of lies will continue to rise long after the water that inundated the southeast recedes.
There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week.
In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many ZIP codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.
“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.”
Delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina had already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute lawsuit to take his name off of millions of already-printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: the deadline for voter registration in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the measures necessary to ensure there is voting,” Brinson Bell said. But there are innumerable issues to solve first, and state officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused.
“There’s a cascading series of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh.
At the moment, the central logistical problem is that the U.S. Postal Service has suspended service across much of western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested mail-in ballots this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored — damage is so severe in some ZIP codes that it may be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is compounded by the fact that in rural areas, some postal workers use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm.
“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impacts,” a spokesperson for the Postal Service told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local boards of election in impacted areas to ensure the ongoing transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”
Residents of Asheville, North Carolina, gather at a fire station to access WiFi and check emergency information after Hurricane Helene. The storm caused record flooding throughout western North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must mail these ballots back in time for them to reach election offices by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Elections Board is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There’s also no way of tracking where the absentee ballots that counties already sent out ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.
And then there’s the matter of in-person voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there have been no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There may be polling places affected by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Brinson Bell said. There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.
Every county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and right now the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said that many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, in particular smaller ones.
“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the board of elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”
Cohen said he’s heard that the North Carolina legislature, which will convene next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help these counties establish new voting sites and train up replacement poll workers. He believes the state can still manage a robust election if it provides proper support for local election boards — in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”
But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people who have been affected by a historic and deadly flood event typically aren’t thinking about where they will cast their ballots — they’re focusing on locating their loved ones, mucking out their houses, finding new housing, filing insurance claims, and dozens of other priorities that trump voting.
The State Board of Elections in North Carolina has a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their mail-in ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, WiFi, and cell service.
For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election. “Hurricane season in the U.S. — between June and November every year — usually coincides with election season,” a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA, said. “The chances of hurricanes disrupting U.S. elections are ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.”
Residents of Marshall, North Carolina, search for missing items from a nearby mechanics shop in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The flooding from the storm has destroyed polling places across the western part of the state.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Prior to Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can dip precipitously during these events.
“The biggest challenge that we see is not just technology failure, but a decrease in public confidence,” Vasu Mohan, a senior advisor at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, then making last minute accommodations is extremely difficult.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it’s possible to conduct elections fairly after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need.
“I am very, very worried about how [the storm] will affect voting,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, which did not sustain severe damage from the storm. Werner and her partner are Democrats, and make a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of worries it is an additional wave,” she said.
Brinson Bell’s office will likely face a flurry of lawsuits due to its handling of post-storm voting — it is already navigating a lawsuit, filed by Republican groups prior to the storm, over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But she said the COVID-19 pandemic and prior storms prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We held an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the COVID pandemic,” she said. “We’ve battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do so again.”
A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever reach a goal she set out to achieve as a presidential hopeful in 2019. But at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia — five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race — Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.
Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense.
That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire- and -flood-prone states like California and Florida.
While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change.
Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.
Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.
Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.
Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.
“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”
Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future.
Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.
As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.
“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. There is quite a bit of research on the politics of disasters and how extreme weather shapes voter behavior. We’ve cited some of it in this newsletter. Today, you’ll hear about that research through a different lens: from a researcher whose career, and life, was turned upside down by one of the deadliest disasters in American history.
In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich was finishing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children, renting a house in New Orleans to begin his first-ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was abuzz in late August as students moved into their dormitories and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching. He never made it to campus. Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 storm the morning of August 29, 2005, leading to more than 1,500 deaths in three Southern states and causing $300 billion in damages.
The front of Daniel Aldrich’s rented house, located eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Courtesy of Daniel Aldrich
Twelve feet of water turned Aldrich’s house, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp, destroying everything he owned, including his car. The Aldriches evacuated to Texas first, then moved back to Boston. They didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the on-the-ground horrors,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his house uptown to Tulane, little springs of water would shoot up out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwater had crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was next to impossible. Grocery stores weren’t stocked. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood had tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwater and post-hurricane demolition had sent the lead in the paint coating many of the houses in the city swirling into the environment.
“Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned. For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”
— Disaster researcher Daniel Aldrich
Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life, and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disasters and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and becoming one of America’s foremost disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina are radicalizing — often representing an individual’s first interactions with the federal government. That experience, his research has found, can end up dictating political preferences and voter behavior.
Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically engaged post-disaster: They run for office, start community groups, and show up at town meetings. Aldrich, used to sitting outside of the research he was conducting, realized that he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned,” he said. “For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”
Researchers in Japan analyzed the effects of disaster relief on the electoral outcomes of incumbent parties. Decades of data revealed that electoral goods doled out in response to extreme weather events before elections can lead to statistically significant electoral gains for the party in power. We’re talking a bump of a few percentage points — 2.8 and 5.4 points for Japan’s lower and upper legislative chambers, respectively — but in my conversation with Aldrich, he pointed out that because just a third of eligible voters typically turn out to vote, a change of 2 to 5 percent is “a pretty big deal.”
What we’re reading
As PA chooses the next president, its unions are choosing clean energy: A coalition of trade unions have launched a new advocacy group, Union Energy, to ensure that Pennsylvania’s workers get a “just transition” to a fossil-fuel-free economy. My colleague Gautema Mehta reports on unions in the state, which is the nation’s second-largest producer and exporter of fuels for energy. Read more
1 in 4 homeowners financially unprepared for the costs of extreme weather: As major insurance companies pull back coverage in flood- and fire-prone areas, a survey conducted by Bankrate, a financial services company, finds that 26 percent of homeowners fear they can’t afford the costs of climate-driven disasters. Another 15 percent of the 1,300 homeowners surveyed said they would go into debt just covering the deductible on their insurance policies. Read more
10 tough climate questions for the presidential debate: Journalists at Inside Climate News have 10 climate questions for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who are preparing for their first head-to-head debate in Pennsylvania tonight. Climate change and extreme weather rarely get airtime during presidential debates. Inside Climate has the questions climate-conscious voters wish moderators would ask the candidates. Read more
Washington state to reconsider its landmark climate program: In 2021, Washington lawmakers passed a cap-and-invest program, modeled after California’s carbon market, aimed at reducing emissions 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. In November, voters in the Evergreen State will vote on a measure that would repeal that program. Politico reporters interviewed the Democratic state senator fighting to keep it alive. Read more
Extreme heat strains the power grid and causes outages through LA County: Triple-digit temperatures in California are setting records and leading to grid failures throughout Los Angeles County and other parts of the state. Thousands of customers in Los Angeles and in the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Southern California lost power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, several school districts canceled classes and reassessed the efficacy of their cooling systems due to high temperatures. Read more
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The disaster effect on Sep 10, 2024.
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. There is quite a bit of research on the politics of disasters and how extreme weather shapes voter behavior. We’ve cited some of it in this newsletter. Today, you’ll hear about that research through a different lens: from a researcher whose career, and life, was turned upside down by one of the deadliest disasters in American history.
In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich was finishing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children, renting a house in New Orleans to begin his first-ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was abuzz in late August as students moved into their dormitories and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching. He never made it to campus. Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 storm the morning of August 29, 2005, leading to more than 1,500 deaths in three Southern states and causing $300 billion in damages.
The front of Daniel Aldrich’s rented house, located eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Courtesy of Daniel Aldrich
Twelve feet of water turned Aldrich’s house, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp, destroying everything he owned, including his car. The Aldriches evacuated to Texas first, then moved back to Boston. They didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the on-the-ground horrors,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his house uptown to Tulane, little springs of water would shoot up out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwater had crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was next to impossible. Grocery stores weren’t stocked. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood had tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwater and post-hurricane demolition had sent the lead in the paint coating many of the houses in the city swirling into the environment.
“Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned. For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”
— Disaster researcher Daniel Aldrich
Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life, and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disasters and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and becoming one of America’s foremost disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina are radicalizing — often representing an individual’s first interactions with the federal government. That experience, his research has found, can end up dictating political preferences and voter behavior.
Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically engaged post-disaster: They run for office, start community groups, and show up at town meetings. Aldrich, used to sitting outside of the research he was conducting, realized that he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned,” he said. “For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”
Researchers in Japan analyzed the effects of disaster relief on the electoral outcomes of incumbent parties. Decades of data revealed that electoral goods doled out in response to extreme weather events before elections can lead to statistically significant electoral gains for the party in power. We’re talking a bump of a few percentage points — 2.8 and 5.4 points for Japan’s lower and upper legislative chambers, respectively — but in my conversation with Aldrich, he pointed out that because just a third of eligible voters typically turn out to vote, a change of 2 to 5 percent is “a pretty big deal.”
What we’re reading
As PA chooses the next president, its unions are choosing clean energy: A coalition of trade unions have launched a new advocacy group, Union Energy, to ensure that Pennsylvania’s workers get a “just transition” to a fossil-fuel-free economy. My colleague Gautema Mehta reports on unions in the state, which is the nation’s second-largest producer and exporter of fuels for energy. Read more
1 in 4 homeowners financially unprepared for the costs of extreme weather: As major insurance companies pull back coverage in flood- and fire-prone areas, a survey conducted by Bankrate, a financial services company, finds that 26 percent of homeowners fear they can’t afford the costs of climate-driven disasters. Another 15 percent of the 1,300 homeowners surveyed said they would go into debt just covering the deductible on their insurance policies. Read more
10 tough climate questions for the presidential debate: Journalists at Inside Climate News have 10 climate questions for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who are preparing for their first head-to-head debate in Pennsylvania tonight. Climate change and extreme weather rarely get airtime during presidential debates. Inside Climate has the questions climate-conscious voters wish moderators would ask the candidates. Read more
Washington state to reconsider its landmark climate program: In 2021, Washington lawmakers passed a cap-and-invest program, modeled after California’s carbon market, aimed at reducing emissions 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. In November, voters in the Evergreen State will vote on a measure that would repeal that program. Politico reporters interviewed the Democratic state senator fighting to keep it alive. Read more
Extreme heat strains the power grid and causes outages through LA County: Triple-digit temperatures in California are setting records and leading to grid failures throughout Los Angeles County and other parts of the state. Thousands of customers in Los Angeles and in the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Southern California lost power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, several school districts canceled classes and reassessed the efficacy of their cooling systems due to high temperatures. Read more
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The disaster effect on Sep 10, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.
This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics. It is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.
In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich, a researcher, was finishing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children, renting a house in New Orleans to begin his first-ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was abuzz in late August as students moved into their dormitories and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching. He never made it to campus. Twelve feet of water had turned his house, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp, destroying everything he owned, including his car, and sending his life in a totally new direction.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 storm the morning of August 29, 2005, leading to more than 1,500 deaths in three Southern states and causing $300 billion in damages. In New Orleans, poor city planning and lack of flood resilience made a bad situation worse. Some 80 percent of the city was underwater 48 hours after Katrina hit. It would take many months for the people who evacuated to come back. A portion of the population never returned, and the city still bears the scars of Katrina’s impact, and the recovery process — botched by bad politics, racism, and lack of foresight — that followed.
The Aldriches evacuated to Texas first, then moved back to Boston, where they stayed in an apartment rented for them by sympathetic friends and family. They watched on television as thousands of people, trapped in the Louisiana Superdome, begged for water and medical supplies. One close friend was evacuated from his rooftop by helicopter and dropped off at the airport, where there wasn’t enough food to go around.
Aldrich and his family didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the on-the-ground horrors,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his house uptown to Tulane, little springs of water would shoot up out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwater had crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was next to impossible. Grocery stores weren’t stocked. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job offer in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood had tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwater and post-hurricane demolition had sent the lead in the paint coating many of the houses in the city swirling into the environment.
The front of Daniel Aldrich’s rented house, located eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Courtesy of Daniel Aldrich
Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life, and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disasters and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and becoming one of America’s foremost disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina are radicalizing — often representing an individual’s first interactions with the federal government. That experience, his research has found, can end up dictating political preferences and voter behavior.
Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically engaged post-disaster: They run for office, start community groups, and show up at town meetings. Aldrich, used to sitting outside of the research he was conducting, realized that he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned,” he said. “For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”
Grist spoke with Aldrich, now a professor of political science at Northeastern University, about his post-disaster experience, how climate shocks like hurricanes affect voters, and how Americans’ expectations of how the federal government should respond to a disaster have changed over time. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. What happens, politically, to voters after a disaster? How does their behavior change?
A. There’s a lot of interesting research on this question. I think there are two things we have to think about. One is, what happens in terms of voting itself? Do people turn out to vote more than they would have in a normal year, not a disaster year or month?
Some people argue that civic engagement as a whole increases for survivors of disasters. They’re more likely to vote, more likely to run for office, more likely to contact a congressperson, more likely to get involved in a meeting. There’s really interesting before-and-after studies of survivors themselves.
But then, the second question is: When they do that, whom do they vote for, and what happens then?
Typically, most of us don’t really encounter the government, except in moments like getting our driver’s license or passport renewed. But during a disaster, the vast majority of us begin to, because we’re applying for some kind of aid. Rather than being some abstract entity, now there actually is an agency in the government you’re interacting with. You think, ”Oh my God, I’ve been paying taxes since I was 22 or 23. Here’s my chance to get my money back.”
This is the funny thing about being both a survivor of a disaster and a scholar involved in studying disasters. My FEMA application was rejected in the first six months after Katrina. So that did not go well for me, but for other people who it goes well for, you can get thousands of dollars. So either people are really pissed, like me, because they didn’t get what they wanted. They want to punish the government. Or they’re thrilled. They got something. The government actually came through.
Q. Given that spectrum of sentiment around disaster relief — where some victims get what they want, and others hit brick walls — what are the repercussions for politicians?
A. A lot of data has shown that in flooded areas, people tend to show up to vote in higher numbers for the incumbent party. Why is that? The party in power, if they’re smart, begins pumping a lot of extra stuff in. They pump extra personnel assistance and assistance to businesses, to schools, or just road infrastructure. The levers of power allow the incumbent party to begin showering all kinds of, as we call them, pork barrel politics, or electoral goods, back into those communities.
If you look at the number of disaster declarations in an election year, they’re statistically higher than in non-election years. Even a small disaster — a tanker truck overturns and blocks I-40, there’s a fire in someone’s backyard and six people are made homeless — the party in power can take even this small thing and turn into a bigger one again, to get more aid, get more systems going, specifically, more disaster declarations. It feeds back to this idea that the party in power is using those levers of power during that short period to try to attract voters.
This is very deliberate. And you can say, “I’m really helping everybody,” and that it’s nonpartisan to defend yourself. You can say, “Well, look, I’ve got Democrats, some Republicans in my district. I want to make sure everyone is safe.”
There are also people who have argued — using flooding again, because flooding is very common — that there’s as much likelihood of people punishing the party in power as there is supporting the party. When Katrina flooded my house, I was very angry. We had to fax our FEMA application in, and we were on the road to Houston stopping in, like, Kinkos, trying to fax it in. I cannot tell you how frustrating that process was, and then it got rejected.
Q. Can we talk about FEMA? For many people, belief in or mistrust of FEMA almost comprises its own political affiliation. The agency tends to bear the brunt of people’s anger, right?
A. We envision FEMA as a white knight: FEMA guys in tents handing out food. That’s not what they do. And there’s very few FEMA employees to begin with. Their job is literally to say to a state or local representative, “Nice job, you built a hospital, now we’re writing a check to reimburse you.” That’s what they are, they’re a check-writing organization. But the expectations we had as a nation used to be very different.
More than 100 years ago in Boston, we had the Great Molasses Flood that killed nearly two dozen people. A huge molasses tank broke and all that molasses went through the downtown, picked up people, and they drowned, because you can’t breathe it, you can’t swim out of it. The bottom line is that when that happened, even though you’d think, “OK, this is a great time for the national government,” no one got involved besides local organizations. It was all like churches, synagogues, and mosques, and the local Boston city office got involved, and the expectation that disasters were a local problem continued really until World War II.
And then by the 1950s and ’60s, when we had this whole “nuclear bombs are coming” Cold War thing, we went from Americans expecting the federal government to do nothing to now expecting a lot from the government. And that gap between expectation and reality began to put pressure on FEMA. It’s not really FEMA’s job to rebuild, that’s not what they do.
Q. It seems like a bad situation — that FEMA wasn’t built for what people expect it to do, and also that climate change is making these extreme-weather events happen more often and with more intensity.
A. The number of shocks that we have, the number of disasters that we have, are happening more often, and the shocks that are happening are more impactful. We have this data going back 100 years. If you look at things like hurricanes, and other meteorological disasters, they’re increasing in magnitude, so their damage is increasing. And also the frequency is increasing, meaning the gap between them is getting shorter so that local governments have less capacity. They [might be] dealing with Disaster 1 and Disaster 2 at the same time. So that’s absolutely true.
We need a new 21st century structure for handling these new, more regular and stronger disasters. How will we handle the costs of climate change? We spend way too much money after the fact and not enough money before the fact. The idea that we should be building resistance to a shock is a very powerful one that we don’t do very well. Typically, we spend all the money, again, in election years and after the disaster.
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