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Paradise Toss'd
From Helene's storm of lies to the dread monster Milton.
Brad Johnson
October 07, 2024
PRESENTED BY ANIMADVERSIONS
The seas are again rough with black winds and storms. This divine blessing straight vanishes like a fair sky, and brings on such a scene of cloud and tempest, as turns all to shipwrack without haven or shore.
A fortnight after the birth of Hurricane Helene in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Milton, fed by the same oil-heated waters, has spawned. Grown to monstrous strength, it spirals toward Florida’s western shores. Tampa Bay is menaced by the sea, dark, wasteful, wild, up from the bottom turned by furious winds and surging waves. Clouds from many a horrid rift abortive shall pour fierce rain with lightning mixed.
Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain, but now, the sky and sea poisoned by Exxon, Chevron and BP, our storms are behemoths, our droughts and floods Biblical, our heat waves as the fires of Hell. Helene alone has caused the deaths of at least 232 people and could cost $250 billion.
The ever-threatening storms of chaos blustering round, inclement sky are running through the reserves of the federal agencies tasked with providing economic support to those affected, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration. On Friday, President Joe Biden sent a missive calling for Congress to return to approve new disaster relief:
While FEMA has the resources needed for the immediate emergency response phase, at least one other agency does not. Most urgently, the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) disaster loan program will run out of funding in a matter of weeks and well before the Congress is planning to reconvene. . . . In addition, while FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund has the resources it requires right now to meet immediate needs, the fund does face a shortfall at the end of the year. Without additional funding, FEMA would be required to forego longer-term recovery activities in favor of meeting urgent needs.
The Pharisaical Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation), is rejecting Biden’s call for action before the November election, nonchalantly claiming there’s no need for urgency. Belike a subtile Janus, he has two faces about Helene, visiting Florida and North Carolina to agree with locals that FEMA has been doing an excellent job, and then going on Fox News to claim the very opposite:
“At the federal level, this has been a massive failure. And you could just ask the people there on the ground. I have been there. I was in Georgia. I was in Florida, where Hurricane Helene made landfall there on the coast. And then we'll be going to the hardest hit parts of North Carolina on Wednesday of this week. When you talk to the people who are directly affected, they will tell you that this has been an abject failure.”
The economic threats posed by climate change to the federal government are barely understood, the Government Accountability Office warns in a new report, commissioned by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). By way of unintentional example, the GAO cites a 2022 White House Office of Management and Budget report that projects very rapid global warming would increase costs due to hurricanes by at most $36 billion a year by 2050.1 I am secure in betting that is too small a figure.
Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai: lying is thy sustenance, thy food. Yet thou pretend’st to truth. In the wake of Helene, the social-media networks have spread false alarms of fear about the recovery process. There are false and vain conspiracies of weather control and lithium-mining and nothing else but lies about corpses and migrants. Trump’s white-nationalist followers, Musk’s blatant botfarms, and Murdoch’s media outlets have overwhelmed channels of vital communication with glozing lies.
Murdoch’s New York Post claims that residents of Bat Cave, N.C. in need of FEMA’s help don’t want it; Murdoch’s Fox News attacks Karine Jean-Pierre with racist lies about FEMA and migrants; Musk’s X is a flood of lies.
Their false trade of deceiving has given those working on Helene recovery the additional burden of correcting the lies. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg had to debunk Musk’s lies about the Federal Aviation Administration. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins denounced Trump’s “storm of lies.” FEMA now has a “rumor response” tool. The White House released a memo beseeching leaders to “stop spreading poison.” State Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-N.C.) called out the “conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook.”
To Trump, Murdoch, Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai: ‘Twill not restore the truth and honesty that thou hast banish't from thy tongue with lies.
Hearings This Week:
On Tuesday at 10 am local time in Oregon, House Natural Resources Water, Wildlife and Fisheries subcommittee chair Cliff Bentz (R-Ore.) holds a field hearing examining efforts to improve and protect Central Oregon’s water supply.
Climate Action This Week:
On Tuesday at 6 pm Eastern, the Calls for Climate Coalition is hosting climate hawk Josh Riley, the Democratic candidate for New York’s 19th Congressional, for a Q&A, followed by phone banking until 10 pm.
On Thursday at 9 pm Eastern, Environmental Justice Voters for Harris-Walz is phone banking with Dana Johnson and Rahwa Ghirmatzion.
Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.
As Initech learned, it’s a bad idea to ignore Milton.
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1 The OMB report does project that annual costs of federal disaster response to hurricanes would skyrocket by $100 billion annually by 2075. So the modeling they’re doing is on track with reality, likely a few generations behind.
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