An aerial view of gas being burned off near overturned tank cars amid flood damage wrought by Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on Oct. 4, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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 hundreds 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 people across seven states have lost their lives and an unknown number are still missing. But the death toll from Hurricane Helene could climb into the thousands in the decades to come from what researchers call indirect deaths. My friend was incredulous. My sympathies did not amount to much.
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, healthcare 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 and other “natural disasters” outside of our control, random “acts of God,” an unavoidable fact of life? According to well-established climate science, the answer is not so simple. While no government or other human force can control, much less conjure, a hurricane (the energy contained in Hurricane Helene far exceeds that of all the world’s militaries combined, as Bill Nye recently told CNN), the science clearly shows that human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of all kinds of extreme weather events.
According to peer-reviewed statistical models from the nonpartisan, nonprofit World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London, climate change made Hurricane Helene’s devastating winds and rainfall significantly worse than they would have been without the 2.3ºF of global heating caused by burning fossil fuels. Specifically, the models showed increased ocean and air temperatures made Helene’s unprecedented rainfall 70 percent more likely over the three-day period and increased the frequency of such Category 4 storms in Helen’s vicinity by roughly 150 percent.
That’s because, as Nye explained, bathtub-like water in the Gulf of Mexico — which has sustained record high temperatures of nearly 90ºF in recent months — are “fuel” for hurricanes. As hot seawater evaporates and pumps water into the lower atmosphere, nearby air rushes into the low pressure area below. The rising water vapor condenses into clouds and releases heat into the air, pulling in more air and building higher and larger clouds in a rapidly intensifying cycle. The extreme ocean temperatures off the Florida coast 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 20-30 percent 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 percent greater than it would have been without carbon pollution and nearly half the loss and damage sustained by residents of Florida (and American taxpayers at large) was attributed to climate change. Current projections of property damage alone from Milton are as high as $60 billion, making it the costliest storm in Florida history after Hurricane Ian in 2022.
These findings are broadly consistent with macro analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that for every 1ºF of warming, the cost in reduced GDP is around 5 percent. 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 and local infrastructure damage from worsening storms and d floods.
What are we to make of all this data? It turns out that far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) are onto something when they claim that shadowy forces are behind extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene. Only the real climate culprits are not National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or “deep state” actors of 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 (as well as political influence) 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 with $92 billion and $57 billion, respectively. 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 across the United States. 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 $16 billion 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.