Hurricane Helene’s Lessons for San Diego About Climate Change

What's the worst that could happen? say deniers opposing Measure G

The Southeastern United States took a gut punch last week as Category 4 Hurricane Helene rolled up the Piedmont into North Carolina and Southern Virginia before taking a northwestern path and stalling over Kentucky.

Helene was geographically huge, spreading heavy rains as far north as Pennsylvania and west to Missouri. When it rode over the Appalachian Mountains as much as 30 inches of rain were measured in North Carolina and Tennessee.

The ground was already soaked in Asheville, North Carolina when the storm hit, destroying the myth of higher elevation (2000ft above sea level) cities being safe havens from the worst effects of climate change.

Via ABC News:

• Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argues that society needs to move away from viewing some groups as refugees of the climate crisis and instead acknowledge the need for everyone to invest in measures that will make communities and individuals more resilient to extreme weather.

• "What folks have experienced over the last few days of Hurricane Helene is unprecedented and terrifying, they're certainly not alone in experiencing it," Dahl said in an interview.

• The international think-tank Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050.

It will be weeks before the final death toll is calculated, and perhaps months before the damages to infrastructure and buildings are known.

This storm would be “political” even if it wasn’t a presidential election year. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation removing the words “climate change” from all state documents. In July, education officials directed publishers to remove references to climate change from textbooks used in Florida's public schools.

Former President Donald Trump pursued the politics of disaster, traveling to Georgia on Monday to survey damage from Hurricane Helene. He accused the Biden administration of being slow to respond with disaster relief, a claim refuted by Governors in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The GOP nominee’s actions and words served as a reminder of the elements in Project 2025, privatizing portions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Agency, and downsizing the federal government’s role in FEMA by having state governments take the lead in disaster relief.

Some news coverage also included references to the Trump administration’s disaster responses, including: 

• imagery of the President tossing out paper towels in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria, 

• re-imagining a hurricane’s path with a sharpie, 

• transferring $155 million from FEMA’s operating budget to return migrants to Mexico, 

• refusal to grant 99% of aid to North Carolina after its Democratic Governor requested help in the aftermath of hurricane Matthew, 

• threat to withhold disaster assistance available in response to wildfires in California. 

It’s important to also remember Trump’s commitment to dirty energy including weakening or eliminating more than 125 environmental rules over four years, and his promise to do whatever Big Oil wants if they gave him $1 billion for his campaign.

On the reality-based side of this current event, FEMA had team leaders prepositioned in impacted areas, and there were eight other Federal agencies working to provide disaster relief including the:

• Department of Health and Human Services, 

• Coast Guard, 

• Army Corps of Engineers, 

• Environmental Protection Agency, 

• Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey, 

• Small Business Administration, 

• Department of Energy and 

• Department of Agriculture.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden said they’d travel to areas impacted by the storm once officials on the ground indicated a visit would not be disruptive to relief and rescue efforts.

The science of what happened during Helene’s overland path was that moisture laden air released its payload as the surface below gained altitude. The rainfall along its path ultimately was caused by oceanic warming along with a warmer atmosphere being able to hold more water.

Here’s Mark Sumner, writing at his new home base, Uncharted Blue:

• Media outlets will still tell you that there’s no way to tie this particular storm to the human-caused climate crisis. They can probably still trot out a supposed expert or two to agree. But you know it’s bullshit. They know it’s bullshit. It’s bullshit.

• Because the waters were warmer, the winds were higher. Because the waters were warmer, the storm surge was stronger. Because the water was warmer, the rainfall was intensified. And the water was warmer because of us.

• Hurricane Helene is another reminder that the crisis isn’t ahead, it’s here. We caused it. Only we can fix it. The cost of inaction is measured in lives. And nowhere is safe.

Here’s the part where San Diegans ought to be worried about, namely the probability of a decade containing multiple “1000 year floods,” like the one experienced in February of this year. And there’s also a steady  increase in ocean levels. Maybe the merchants in OB can be persuaded to take up a collection to re-invent the area to be canal-centric, like Venice, Italy.

Our city government whiffed on the possibility of an incremental property tax increase to fund water infrastructure for political reasons.

There is one measure on this year’s San Diego County general election ballots that will provide (not enough) funding toward mitigating climate change, namely Measure G.

According to the advocates at Let’s Go San Diego - Yes on Measure G, the monies generated by a half-cent sales tax increase will:

• Get more cars off the road by expanding the transit system

• Make existing roads and highways safer and more efficient.

• Fix aging bridges, local roads and rail lines in danger of collapse

• Reduce air pollution to protect our environment and quality of life

There is opposition to Measure G. Aside from the No New Taxes rationale, their complaint is that Measure G will spend money on expanding the transit system that we don’t need. 

This is unbelievably short sighted. It can take a decade to build transit, and climate deniers like Supervisor Jim Desmond and Congressional candidate/El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells seem to think the only thing needed in the way of transportation infrastructure are more freeway lanes.

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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About

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Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords by Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic

• Any future worth living in is going to get housing right. We need to stop thinking of housing as an asset and realize that it is, first and foremost, a human right. That's the premise of my 2023 solarpunk novel *The Lost Cause*, which just came out in paperback.

• You can't protect yourself from rising seas or rising healthcare bills through individual home-ownership. Solidarity - the kind of solidarity that once powered the union movement, and that is powering it again - is the only way to defeat the housing profiteers. The New Deal wasn't perfect, which is why whatever we do next has to be bigger, further reaching, and more inclusive than what FDR did almost a century ago.

• The only minority that should be excluded from the next New Deal is *billionaires*.

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Senate Democrats seek probe into DOJ investigation of Trump and Egypt by Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig at The Washington Post

• Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the Justice Department’s inspector general a letter Monday asking him to investigate whether Trump appointees “interfered with and, ultimately, blocked” a criminal probe into U.S. intelligence that the Egyptian government sought to give Donald Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign.

• The request for DOJ’s watchdog to review how the case ended comes after a Washington Post article in August revealed details of a secret Justice Department investigation that was closed, despite prosecutors and agents having sought to take additional investigative steps.

• The Post reported that, five days before Trump took office, an amount nearly identical to the $10 million described in the intelligence about Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi was withdrawn at a bank in Cairo, in U.S. $100 bills, from an account linked to the Egyptian General Intelligence Service. The discovery of the withdrawal, early in 2019, intensified the secret investigation.

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San Francisco cops are using a silly stunt to catch law-breakers by Alec Regimbal at SFGate

• On Monday morning, San Francisco police Lt. Jonathan Ozol wore a flamboyant, inflatable chicken costume as he attempted to navigate a crosswalk on Alemany Boulevard near the intersection of Rousseau Street. The purpose of the exercise was to issue tickets to drivers who flouted state law by not yielding to a pedestrian like Ozol as he attempted to cross. Quite a few drivers failed that test.

• The ostentatious costume, according to police Capt. Amy Hurwitz, serves two purposes. “I don’t want them to get run over,” she told me. “But the costume is so bright, it’s like, how can you miss it?”

• Hurwitz said Monday’s exercise is one of five that the San Francisco Police Department has conducted over the last six months as San Francisco tries to achieve vision zero. The intersections and costumes often change, but the mission is the same: To ensure drivers are paying extra attention as they approach a crosswalk.