BY DAN WEEKS
At dinner last week, a New Hampshire friend who hails from North Carolina told me about towns he used to know in the Appalachian Mountains that were recently washed away by Hurricane Helene. These rural communities are hun-dreds of miles from the coast in an area thought to be a climate refuge. Now, thousands of their former residents are climate refugees after the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina nearly two decades ago. Over 250 innocent people have lost their lives and at least 1,400 are still reported missing. Long term, the death toll from Hurricane Helene is expected to climb into the thousands. My friend was incredulous. My sympathies did not amount to much.
Dan Weeks
While the true human cost of loved ones lost and lives uprooted is incalculable, we now have credible estimates of the financial burden local families and communities, and we the taxpaying public, will bear. According to Insurance Journal, the latest verified information on Hurricane Helene’s infrastructure damage, health care costs, disruptions to tourism and other industries, as well as loss of life is between $225-$250 billion. That’s nearly a third of the annual GDP of the entire state of North Carolina, where much of the damage occurred, and twice the size of New Hampshire’s GDP.
Why raise the issue of costs? Aren’t hurricanes a form of “natural disaster” outside of our control? According to well-established climate science, the answer is not so simple. While humans cannot control a hurricane, the science clearly shows that manmade climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of all kinds of extreme weather events.
In fact, Hurricane Helene’s devastating winds and rainfall were significantly worse than they would have been without the 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit of global heating caused by burning fossil fuels, according to peer-reviewed statistical models from World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London. Specifically, the models showed increased ocean and air temperatures made Helene’s unprecedented rainfall 70% more likely over the three-day period and increased the frequency of such Category 4 storms in Helene’s vicinity by roughly 150%.
That’s because, as Bill Nye explained on CNN, bathtub-like water in the Gulf of Mexico is “fuel” for hurricanes. The extreme ocean temperatures, which have sustained record highs of nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit in recent months, turbocharged Helene from a Category 1 to Category 4 hurricane in less than a day and dumped some 40 trillion gallons of rain over the southeastern U.S.
World Weather Attribution also found that rainfall from Helene’s successor, Hurricane Milton, was 20% to 30% more intense and twice as likely in today’s climate compared to one without global heating from fossil fuels. What’s more, Milton’s intensity at landfall was 40% greater than it would have been without carbon pollution, and nearly half the projected $60 billion property damage sustained by residents of Florida (and American taxpayers at large) was attributed to climate change.
These findings are broadly consistent with macro analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that for every 1 degree Fahrenheit of global heating, the cost in reduced GDP is around 5%. Set in the New Hampshire context, that’s roughly $6 billion per year in economic losses from climate damage. It is on par with the $5.1 billion official state estimates (in 2024 dollars) of public health costs from carbon pollution, combined with known losses to key New Hampshire industries like outdoor recreation in a hotter world and local infrastructure damage from climate-fueled storms and floods.
What are we to make of all this data? It turns out that far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Georgia) are onto something when they claim that shadowy forces are behind extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene. Only the real climate culprits are not NOAH or “deep state” actors of Rep. Greene’s imagination but the same special interests that have long funded her and her party’s political campaigns: fossil fuel corporations. The same corporations whose own internal research beginning in the 1970s accurately predicted today’s climate catastrophes but who then spent billions of dollars in public misinformation contradicting their findings.
According to the latest campaign finance disclosures, the U.S. energy sector, led by Koch Inc. and Chevron, has so far spent $115 million on federal campaign contributions in 2024, most of it going to Republicans and outside groups who oppose government action to limit climate damage. That’s on top of the $141 million that oil and gas companies and electric utilities spent lobbying the federal government in 2023, employing some 2,053 lobbyists across the energy sector. More than half of those lobbyists are former U.S. Senators, Representatives or other government officials. An unknown number of other leaders like former Sen. Kelly Ayotte earn millions of dollars as board members of major fossil fuel investors including Blackstone Group.
From the standpoint of such investors, it is money well spent. Although $256 million in campaign donations and lobbying is no small sum, it pales in comparison to the $250 billion in profits earned by the top five U.S. oil and gas companies alone in 2022-23, led by Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Those record profits would not be possible if fossil fuel companies were denied the tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies and access to public lands they receive each year, much less if they were held accountable for the damage their products have done in North Carolina and Florida and beyond. Indeed, their $250 billion profits neatly match the $225-$250 billion estimated cost of Hurricane Helene. It is also 15 times the federal government’s annual support for clean energy to lower energy costs and combat climate change.
Americans of all stripes are justifiably frustrated by the high cost of living, which tops the list of voting issues in this election. We are also increasingly concerned about the risks of climate damage, even if the scale of current and future costs is not yet widely known. Many see these issues in tension with one another, but the truth is they go hand in hand. For the good of pocketbooks and our economy, not to mention our kids’ future, we should vote for climate action in November.
Dan Weeks is vice president and co-owner of ReVision Energy and a longtime board member of the NH Women’s Foundation.
