The climate crisis supercharged Hurricane Helene's destruction. Where's the Green New Deal?

The climate crisis supercharged Hurricane Helene’s destruction. Where’s the Green New Deal?

Across six south eastern US states, Hurricane Helene has killed at least 150 people with hundreds more missing.

The extreme weather led to 40tn gallons of water falling, according to meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). This caused vast flooding, submerging entire towns in western North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. The storm also caused catastrophic damage, flooding electricity substations and plunging millions into darkness.

Historic climate crisis events around the world

This is not an isolated incident, but the impact of climate change that we are running out of time to try and stop. In Brazil in May, parts of the state of Rio Grande do Sul experienced 500-700 millimetres of rainfall in 10 days. That’s almost half the average annual rainfall in little over a week. Over 100 people were killed.

And in April, the UAE faced its heaviest rainfall since records began in Dubai. This was an entire year’s worth of rainfall in just 12 hours. It caused severe damage.

The climate crisis also does the opposite, disrupting rainfall patterns and leading to droughts. This was the case for four consecutive seasons in Kenya, its worst drought in 40 years. Then, in early May, floods suddenly hit, killing at least 228 people and displacing around 212,630.

For Hurricane Helene, climate change may have caused 50% more rainfall in some parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, according to a preliminary analysis from Berkeley National Laboratory. It also made the observed rainfall 20 times more likely in these areas, according to the analysis.

More broadly, scientists have found that the climate crisis has impacted the likelihood or severity of extreme weather events in 80% of cases studied.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, where’s the Green New Deal?

Yet in the UK, prime minister Keir Starmer dropped his pledge to invest £28bn in a transition to sustainable green energy. In the US, vice president Kamala Harris has boasted that the Biden-Harris administration oversaw “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. And Donald Trump is even worse. He outright called the climate crisis “one of the great scams” in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

A publicly funded Green New Deal, meanwhile, could address the climate crisis and bring our energy production and infrastructure into public ownership in one fell swoop, creating high-worth jobs and saving money through averting future damage. Not to mention it could halt our extinction, where we risk hitting tipping points of no return in unstoppable warming.