Thoughts and Prayers for Asheville
Assessing the Damage in Post-Climate-Crisis America
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more carefree activity than a summertime inner-tube trip down the French Broad River. It seemed like the perfect way to spend a brutally hot afternoon this past July when I went down to Asheville to see some old college friends. The river was low and lazy that day when we slipped into its languid flow. Our greatest causes for concern were adequate sunscreen coverage, banging our middle-aged backs on river rocks, and spilling our Coors light when standing up and walking over the stretches of the French Broad too shallow to float across. The river's flow was so subtle that there were moments when it felt like time was suspended and we would have to paddle with our hands if we would ever make it to the New Belgium Brewery before Happy Hour. But rather than hurry the trip along I ignored my typical impatient impulses and embraced the timelessness of it all, going with the literal flow, admiring the galleries and cafes that lined the River Arts District along the banks of the French Broad.
It’s hard to believe that the serene beauty of Asheville’s River Arts District now only exists in memories and photos. It’s hard to believe that the tame and listless French Broad River would become so engorged and enraged by the rains of Hurricane Helene that it could transform into a rampaging torrent submerging and devouring the charming galleries and cafes along its banks.
In the 48 hours it took until I got the word that my Asheville friends were safe, I spent far too much time doom-scrolling images of devastation, hoping to catch a glimpse of their neighborhood. The more images I saw of the apocalyptic impact on basic infrastructure like roads and public water systems the more I became shocked at how little media attention was being directed at the potential for humanitarian disaster now that one of America’s fastest-growing cities had been all but cut off from civilization.
While initial reporting on the devastation in general was scant, I was shocked to find discussion of the role of climate change in this natural disaster was almost completely nonexistent. During the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s nearly every legacy media article on a hurricane or heatwave provided some commentary on the role a warming climate might have in supercharging destructive weather. In all my obsessive Asheville reading over the weekend, the only mention of climate change I saw in the news came not from the reporters but from interviews with artists whose studios and life’s work were swallowed by the French Broad River. Despite Helene exploding from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in under 24 hours as it passed over the record-hot Gulf of Mexico waters, the climate debate so prevalent in past decades seemed eerily absent from coverage of this tragedy.
I am no climate skeptic, but I can be skeptical of the value of climate debate. It always felt a little gross to be out trying to score points in political debates over global warming while people still needed to be rescued from rooftops or delivered fresh water. Yet, amid tragedy, we should not avoid discussing how to mitigate this kind of suffering in the future. Just like school shootings should inspire debate about gun control and the Second Amendment, weather catastrophes should force us to confront whether we are doing enough to stop human-created climate change. Sadly, it seems as though our response to climate change is moving toward the “Thoughts and Prayers” approach so common in the aftermath of the latest mass shooting - politicians will be there to share condolences, give hugs, and hand out care packages, but creating an effective political response to the root cause of tragedy feels too overwhelming and improbable to even attempt.
Hurricane Helene was beginning her monstrous transformation from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm just as I was writing last week’s column on the liberal economists advocating for Kamala Harris to become a “champion” of fracking in Pennsylvania. While I disagreed with Noah Smith, Ruy Teixeira, and Matt Yglesias on their fundamental position that Harris should be loud and proud about continuing the Biden Administration’s record levels of fossil fuel extraction there is one fact I wholeheartedly agree with them on: voters don’t care as much about climate change as they used to. We need to admit that the Climate Crisis is over. “Crisis” derives from the Greek word for decision, specifically the decisive turning point in a disease. A crisis requires a turning point, a moment when society must confront a threat and decide how to proceed. For a crisis to remain a crisis, people must continue to care about the threat at hand and be determined to make the decisions needed to stop it. The dangers of climate change may be more deadly than ever, but if we no longer care about making decisions to avoid those dangers there is no longer a crisis, just a looming threat beyond human control and impervious to political solutions. The numerous headlines referring to the Asheville flooding as "biblical" and the lack of discussion about the potential human role in the Hurricane's wrath show just how far we've moved away from the discourse of climate crisis and toward a new era of passive resignation in the face of powers beyond our control.
As I write this, only one of the two major party candidates has spoken about Hurricane Helene’s relevance to the climate change debate. “They never talk about the environment anymore. You know why?” Donald Trump asked his crowd of supporters at a Sunday afternoon rally in Erie, PA. “It’s one of the greatest scams of all time… people aren’t buying it anymore.” Trump’s aggressive denial of human-created climate change is cynical and morally abhorrent. But it is time to admit that it is a winning message. Trump has relieved his followers of all concern about climate change by telling them what they want to hear: it is all a hoax. Republicans have succeeded in the climate debate by making their electorate so belligerent and delusional about the issue that dialogue seems pointlessly painful.
For Democrats, the move toward a Post-Climate-Crisis mentality has arisen not only from justifiable exhaustion with Republican bad-faith obstructionism but also from a growing sense of complacency in partial victories. The Democratic environmental voter has become a victim of their own success. The Inflation Reduction Act was a great victory for climate activists, with positive outcomes only now coming to fruition two years after its passage. Yet what was once deemed an important first battle in a long war has become rebranded as total victory in campaign season. With the opening of every Hydrogen Hub or unveiling of an EV school bus, Democrats' triumphal rhetoric about the Inflation Reduction Act can feel like George W. Bush standing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” just six weeks into the Iraq War. To make matters worse, the partial victories of the Inflation Reduction Act have given some Democrats the schizophrenic license to push for unprecedented levels of American fossil fuel extraction, creating at best a two-steps-forward-one-step-backward path to a reduced carbon future.
Of course, such concessions may be needed to defeat Trump and the MAGA threat to democracy. There is much truth in the Democratic campaign pitch that the best thing that can be done for the environment is keeping Trump out of the White House. But as Democrats welcome the likes of Dick Cheney into their big tent and tout the American Petroleum Institute’s pledge to fight against Trump on behalf of the Inflation Reduction Act, we should not forget Big Oil’s role in not only fueling climate change but also in creating the very conditions that made Trumpism possible in the first place. For decades Big Oil used propaganda and misinformation to make Republican voters skeptical of not only climate science but rational scientific thought itself. To protect their profits against climate action, Big Oil in the Bush-Cheney years sowed the seeds of populist distrust in scientific expertise within the GOP. It's hard to imagine a Republican Party ridden with anti-mask hysteria, Q Anon conspiracies, election denial, and the rise of Trump without decades of Big Oil poisoning their minds with self-serving anti-science propaganda. With the Republicans descending deeper into this mass psychosis and Democrats eager to open their big tent to the Oil and Gas lobby, the possibility of the Climate Crisis reemerging as a viable political issue grows hazier by the day.
We all know climate debate will not save those still at risk from the impact of Hurricane Helene. The truth is, Asheville and the entire region need our thoughts and prayers. But they need so much more than that. With road travel into the area all but impossible, they need our donations more than anything. The Red Cross and World Central Kitchen are great charities for getting aid to those desperately in need of help. But as the waters of the French Broad recede we cannot let the dangers of climate change recede from our national consciousness. Once power is restored and the roads are rebuilt, we must restore and rebuild our will to push for completing the work that has only just begun with the Inflation Reduction Act. And as billions are spent to repair the devastation of Hurricane Helene we should be reminded that not one cent of American taxpayer money should go to the Big Oil corporations who destabilized our climate and our democracy in the process.