The Wild Reed: Peter Kalmus on Fossil-fueled Climate Change and Hurricane Helene

The southeastern United States has been devastated by Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane which made landfall last Thursday (September 26) in the Big Bend region of Florida, near the city of Perry, with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (220 km/h).

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.

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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.

The Wild Reed

Monday, September 30, 2024

Peter Kalmus on Fossil-fueled Climate Change and Hurricane Helene

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