As of today, a total of 133 deaths have been attributed to Helene. The storm triggered coastal storm surges, catastrophic flooding, and tornado damage. Entire neighborhoods across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and North and South Carolina have been submerged in water.
Earlier today, climate activist and climate scientist Peter Kalmus was interviewed on Democracy Now! Following (with added links) is part of what he shared about the connections between fossil-fueled climate change and monster storms like Hurricane Helene.
The planet’s overheating. It’s irreversible. It’s caused by the fossil fuel industry. And the reason I say “industry” specifically, not “fossil fuels,” is because this industry has been systematically lying and blocking action for almost 50 years, for decades and decades. And they’ve said publicly, testifying in front of Congress, that they plan to continue systematically blocking action.
And this will get worse as the planet continues to get hotter. It’s getting hotter every day. Every day we continue burning fossil fuels and allowing this industry to continue spreading disinformation and blocking action, the planet gets hotter. Hotter ocean fuels these storms, causes them to intensify more rapidly, causes them to get much more powerful. And a hotter atmosphere, because we’re living on a currently overheating planet – hotter atmosphere holds more water, so we get these intense, intense rainfalls, which cause the sorts of flooding that’s happening right now.
I think that this is the most evil thing that it’s possible to imagine, that fossil fuel executives and lobbyists will continue to lie so that they can line their bank accounts more at the irreversible expense of our planet and the future of humanity.
I feel desperate as a climate scientist. I’ve been sounding the alarm since 2006. Other scientists have been sounding it for far longer, Dr. James Hansen in the ’80s, even back before that. And we've been completely ignored. You get politicians, even like President Biden, even Democrats, [are] saying things like, “We listen to the scientists.” And then [at] the last presidential debate, we had Trump saying this is a hoax . . . and then Vice President Harris saying, “Climate change is real, but we’re going to expand fracking.” And that’s the cause of climate change. So, we’re living in this strange dystopia where scientists are being completely ignored.
So, I personally don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried a lot of different kinds of activism. Civil disobedience has by far been the most effective, the most effective in building the movement, inspiring other activists. We need the public to have two things before we’re going to be able to act, before we’re going to hold these politicians to account. We need urgency, and we need cause. And the public, in my opinion, doesn’t know those two things. They don’t have the sense that this is existentially urgent, that this is irreversible. However hot the planet gets, that’s how hot it’s going to stay for the rest of our lives, for our children’s lives, grandchildren, many, many generations. And they don’t know cause. There’s a lot of confusion.
This is caused by the fossil fuel industry. So, if we want to stop this, preserve what we can, we need to know that that’s the cause, that they’re blocking action. And we have to target that. Financing from the banks is a huge part of this. They’re still expanding new fossil fuel projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline in my state [of North Carolina] and in Virginia, which is creating natural gas for export that we don’t even need in America, just so these fat cats like Joe Manchin can get more rich. People don’t understand this. And they need to know urgency. This is irreversible. These storms, heat waves, floods, crop failures, migrants – all of this destabilization is going to get worse. It seems like we’re, as humans, more interested in blowing each other up than being grateful and preserving this absolute jewel of a planet that gives us, all of us . . . literally everything. And it seems like we’re not able to get our act together.
For Democracy Now!’s full interview with Peter Kalmus, click here.
Related Off-site Links:
Endless Stream of Climate Disasters Bolsters Demand to “Make Polluters Pay” – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, September 30, 2024).
Climate Movement Says “Hurricane Helene Must Be a Wake-Up Call” – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, September 30, 2024).
Three Climate Priorities World Leaders Must Champion at the UN and Beyond – Rachel Cleetus (Union of Concerned Scientists, September 23, 2024).
Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Blamed as Record Heat Scorches Planet – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, August 8, 2024).
Why Science Backs a Fossil Fuel Phase Out – Timmon Wallace (Common Dreams, December 12, 2023).
“Cabal of Oil Producers”: Climate Scientist Kevin Anderson Slams Corporate Capture of COP28 – Democracy Now! (December 7, 2023).
Big Oil Wins Big at COP28 in Dubai – Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (Democracy Now!, December 14, 2023).
“Tragically Historic”: The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani on the Failure of Yet Another U.N. Climate Summit – Democracy Now! (December 18, 2023).
UPDATES: Helene and Other Storms Dumped a Whopping 40 Trillion Gallons of Rain on the South – Seth Borenstein (AP News, October 1, 2024).
Youth Arrested Demanding VP Debate Question on Climate Emergency – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, October 1, 2024).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Memes of the Times
• COP28: “Mend It, Don’t End It”
• Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson Joins NYC’s March to End Fossil Fuels
• Bernie Sanders: Quote of the Day – July 7, 2023
• “Smoke Plume” in Minneapolis
• Capital Weather Gang: Quote of the Day – June 7, 2023
• Frances Moore Lappé: Quote of the Day – May 22, 2023
• “It Is in Our Hands”
• George Monbiot: Quote of the Day – July 21, 2022
• Declaration of Interdependence
• Biophilia, the God Pan, and a Baboon Named Scott
• Bernie Sanders: Quote of the Day – July 1, 2021
• The Stakes Have Shifted
• The Link Between Destruction of Biodiversity and Emerging Infectious Diseases
• Something to Think About – February 10, 2020
• In Australia, “the Land As We Know It Is No More”
• Greta Thunberg: Quote of the Day – September 23, 2019
• Five Powerful Responses to the Amazon Fires
• Greta Thunberg: Quote of the Day – March 16, 2019
• As the World Burns, Calls for a “Green New Deal”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – August 29, 2017
• The People’s Climate Solidarity March – Minneapolis, 4/29/17
• “It Is All Connected”
• Standing Together
• Standing in Prayer and Solidarity with the Water Protectors of Standing Rock
• The Paris Climate Talks, Multilateralism, and a “New Approach to Climate Action”
• Rachel Smolker: Quote of the Day – September 19, 2014
• Superstorm Sandy: A “Wake-Up Call” on Climate Change
• Chris Hedges: Quote of the Day – May 31, 2011
Image: Hurricane Helene as a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane while nearing landfall near Perry, Florida on September 27, 2024 (late on September 26 locally). (Photo: ABI imagery from NOAA’S GOES-16 satellite)
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