As we continue to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, we speak with Manuel Ivan Guerrero, a freshman at the University of Central Florida and an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, who says young people are extremely worried about the impact of the climate crisis on their communities. “This just has me more scared for what the future’s going to look like in Florida,” he says. “We’re having these thousand-year storms every three, four years now.”
We also speak with David Wallace-Wells, a writer for The New York Times opinion section and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, where he frequently writes about climate. He says the popularity of conspiracy theories during extreme weather events shows that many people are retreating “into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia, and that scares me in some ways even more than the weather itself.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Hurricane Milton comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene battered Florida and other southeastern states, killing at least 230 people. A new analysis by the group World Weather Attribution finds the burning of fossil fuels has made highly destructive storms like Helene more than twice as likely. Florida climate activists have declared Republican Governor Ron DeSantis unfit to lead the state since his policies promote fossil fuels, reject sustainable energy options and ignore or deny the climate crisis.
We’re joined now by two guests. In our New York studio, David Wallace-Wells is with us, New York Times opinion writer, columnist for The New York Times Magazine. His recent piece is headlined “Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene,” author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth.
But we’re going first to Manuel Ivan Guerrero, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Central Florida, UCF. He’s an organizer with the Sunrise Movement helping with hurricane rapid response and has just called on major TV networks to hold a climate hurricane town hall with the presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on October 17th, the day early voting begins in the swing state of North Carolina, parts of which were just devastated by Hurricane Helene.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin in Orlando with Manuel. Describe what the situation is right there, Manuel, and where you’re living, the number of people who had to evacuate, how intense the rain was, and what you’re calling for.
MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: Hi, Amy. Thank you for having me.
And the situation here at UCF is, honestly, a lot better than the rest of the city of Orlando. There’s footage and there’s stuff from the off-campus housing near UCF and downtown Orlando of trees falling down and buildings that are still without power at this time, even as the hurricane left six, seven hours ago. And in general, Orlando is in a much better position than Tampa, due to not being on the coast, but it’s still really, really nowhere near where it should be. And honestly, this just has me more scared for what the future is going to look like in Florida and how the landscape of Florida is going to look like 10, 15 years from now, when we’re having these thousand-year storms every three, four years now.
And we’re definitely extremely concerned about the way that it’s going to affect our community and the people that haven’t been able to evacuate. Many, many people weren’t able to evacuate, either for economic reasons or because of shortages. People aren’t able to evacuate from two storms back to back in this way. When you can’t afford rent, you can’t really afford to buy $300 of gas money and then a hotel somewhere you’ve never been to before.
And what we’re really fighting for is to make the Biden-Harris administration focus on this as a climate issue and to make it a top three priority for them in this coming election, because we need a candidate that’s really fighting for climate. And that’s why we’re calling for this hurricane town hall specifically in North Carolina, probably the most affected state by hurricanes at the moment, a state, in cities, that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable to have flooding in Asheville. And that destruction that we saw in Asheville and the destruction that now we’re seeing in Tampa and in downtown Orlando are things that we really should not be seeing at the moment, things that have — that are completely unprecedented levels of damage. And the way that this hurricane intensified three, four categories in 12, 15 hours is unprecedented, and we should really, really be focused on that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Manuel, can you talk about the situation where Florida, which has been ravaged for decades by major hurricanes but increasingly has become a danger zone for climate change, having a governor who’s a climate crisis denier?
MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: Honestly, with the leadership that we have in Florida right now, they don’t listen to the needs of Florida, of Floridians. We are at the frontline of the climate crisis, and all they focus on is the crisis in the moment of the hurricane and not the root cause. Like, Ron DeSantis sent garbage trucks to Tampa last week to pick up trash before Hurricane Milton and due to the debris from Hurricane Helene, yet he refuses to see the fact that climate change is the cause for this. And we know this for a fact. And we can see the way that fossil fuels are causing these issues, and we can see the intensification and the heat that’s causing all of this to happen.
And the way that we’ve been specifically — even Republican leadership in the state that has recognized the fact that climate change does exist, as Rick Scott said two weeks ago after Hurricane Helene, they still refuse to recognize the reason that the climate is changing. And that is the fossil fuel investment that we have in the state of Florida and the focus that we have on fossil fuels and the fossil fuel lobby that exists so deeply within the state.
AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to play a clip from the Republican presidential debate last year. All eight participants declined to raise their hands when asked by Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum if human activity is to blame for the climate crisis. This is how Florida Governor [Ron] DeSantis responded.
MARTHA MacCALLUM: Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.
GOV. RON DESANTIS: Look, we’re not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate. I mean, I’m happy to take it to start, Alexander.
MARTHA MacCALLUM: OK. You know what?
BRET BAIER: So, do you want to raise your hand or not?
GOV. RON DESANTIS: I don’t think that’s the way to do.
AMY GOODMAN: So, David Wallace-Wells, if you can respond? I mean, we’re talking about a state where the governor, many have described, is a major climate denier. What this means? And, you know, emblematic of many in the country.
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah, I think the story is much bigger than Ron DeSantis. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, Donald Trump campaigning in part on Project ’25’s promises to defund FEMA and cut emergency services and disaster response. We are seeing all of this disinformation surrounding Hurricane Helene with people posting on social media about FEMA helicopters shooting down disaster relief, people circulating conspiracy theories about land being seized by the federal government, not to mention, as you highlighted earlier, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the weather itself is man-made and controlled by the government. There’s a kind of grim irony in those who deny that human activity can be driving the climate crisis but who believe that government actors can control the weather to this scale.
I think we’re entering into a really dark new phase reckoning with the climate crisis, when, you know, 10 or 15 years ago climate activists would have told you, “When the stuff really starts to hit the fan, people are going to wake up.” But I think what we’ve seen over the last few weeks shows us, unfortunately, that when the stuff is hitting the fan, many, many people are choosing instead to retreat into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia. And that scares me, in some ways, even more than the weather itself.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Wallace-Wells, what’s the estimated costs of damages from these hurricanes? You’ve noted that the costs may well exceed the total green investment in the U.S. for the year?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah, well, the damages for Hurricane Milton, we still don’t know. It seems likely to be a less damaging storm than people feared a few days ago because of the path. And that’s a reminder of just how precarious all of this is. A storm moves 10 or 20 miles in one direction, and it can go from being a $100 billion disaster to being a $5 billion disaster. That’s how much we are already living on the knife’s edge.
But we have pretty good preliminary estimates for the damages from Hurricane Helene, and those are at the moment about $175 billion. That is an enormous number. And to put it into context, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total green spending contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, which we are celebrating rightly as the biggest climate investment in American history — the total green investment there, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated it’s $369 billion, and that’s over a 10-year time period. This one storm, Hurricane Helene, delivered almost half of the damage that the IRA has been estimated to pay out in green outlays.
And I think there’s an even bigger context to understand there, too, which is a storm that hit Nepal simultaneously with Hurricane Helene here in the U.S. that killed also 200 people and devastated the country of Nepal. The damage there was estimated at only $175 million, which is to say that storms of incredible catastrophic impact around the world are tallied as unbelievably trivial compared to the damage in the U.S., not because the storm itself was less intense, not because the loss of life was any less severe, not because the damage was any less grim, but just because when we tally these things in dollars, we actually value the lives and the property of people living elsewhere in the world dramatically less than we value the lives and property of people living in the U.S. In fact, that differential is a thousandfold differential between the way that we calculate the damage of Hurricane Helene and the way that we calculated the damage from the flooding in Nepal. That is grotesque. It is, on some level, natural that Americans experience a form of climate narcissism and focus on what’s happening in their backyard. But I think it’s always important to take the global picture and see how much worse those living elsewhere in the world, with many less resources to respond and to adapt than we have, are suffering even more intensely than we are here in the U.S.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To follow up on that global perspective, in the last months we’ve seen the Typhoon Bebinca in China, extreme monsoons in India, heat waves across the Mediterranean, and many of these countries have less resources, as you mentioned, to deal with them, yet the American public is almost unaware of this stuff.
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah. I mean, I mentioned the flooding in Nepal, but at the same time as that was happening, there was also a hurricane hitting Acapulco. That was the second major hurricane to hit Acapulco in a year. The one that hit last summer was perhaps the most dramatic hurricane that we’ve seen in the age of climate crisis. This was a hurricane that intensified from a pretty quotidian tropical storm to a Category 5 monster in the space of 24 hours. And unlike Hurricane Milton, which was projected to intensify over the course of that period, meteorologists who were looking at the Hurricane Otis in Acapulco were completely taken by surprise, which meant that last year that city was almost unable to evacuate. They had so little warning ahead of the storm. They had a similar deluge two weeks ago as we were watching Hurricane Helene, and that’s a city that is now again underwater for the second time in two years.
So, you know, these are storms that seem to demand our full attention when we look at any one of them, and yet there are often multiple of them going on around the world at any one time, which is just another mark of what a different universe of climate impacts and global warming we’re living in now, already entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose human history. We are running an experiment, a dangerous experiment, to see how much of the human civilization we’ve brought with us to this point can survive these new climate conditions. And we’re going to be finding out the answer to that question in the coming decades, unfortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: Relating to this issue of what happens in the rest of the world and how little we pay attention comes the issue of what we do in this country, how we build this country as one of the leading climate change, sadly, promoters in the world, the causes of climate change, this country, the United States. There’s a new research paper finding that in the months after a hurricane landfall, communities experience between, what, 7,000 and 11,000 excess deaths, far above the official estimates. In what way? And why is insurance an important driver of what should actually be sustainable development?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah, the paper about hurricane mortality is really eyebrow-raising and harrowing. And it’s just been published, and, you know, some scientists are still looking at the data, trying to forget exactly what’s going on there. But the basic story is that when a major hurricane hits, everything is disrupted. Medical services are disrupted. Power goes out. People’s lives are interrupted. And those can have knock-on effects, especially in dense communities where vulnerable people ultimately succumb to things that they would have been able to survive in other contexts. This impact, the researchers and the authors of this paper suggest, could account for as much as 5% of total deaths in these areas just from the hurricanes that we’re seeing. It’s a quite grim reminder of just how deadly all of these storms can be. We’ve gotten much better at evacuating, as the evacuations in Florida this week show, but we’re still not protecting people nearly enough. And that goes for the direct mortality impacts. It also goes for the longer-term impacts on lives and livelihood. And that’s, I think, where the insurance question comes in.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen historic losses across the insurance business, driven in part by climate change. And in places like Florida and California, it’s really becoming quite unclear who will be protecting those who need protection. If your house is flooded or destroyed, who will help you rebuild? In North Carolina, we saw the intense center of Hurricane Helene flooding Asheville and its county, Buncombe County. Less than 1% of the homes in that county carry flood insurance. Less than 1%. These are — many of these homes were literally destroyed. Many more of them were damaged considerably. And many of those people living there will have absolutely nowhere to turn for help. They’re not people living in Malibu who have, you know, millions of dollars to spend on a new house after a wildfire. These are people who are quite vulnerable. And both the private insurance system and the federal flood insurance system have very, very little to offer them. I think what we’re being told by these disasters is that we need to do much, much more to protect people in harm’s way and that many more people are really in harm’s way than we thought just even a few years ago.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned earlier Project 2025. With this presidential election less than a month away and a very close race, what are your concerns about how a potential Trump presidency would deal with the issue of climate?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I’m glad to be here talking about it today, because I actually think a lot of the green energy transition stuff that has been going on in the aftermath of the IRA will probably continue, because the political logic of the green investment boom in places like Texas is somewhat undeniable. We’re probably going to continue building out green energy somewhat rapidly.
But on the adaptation and disaster management side, I’m really, really quite concerned. In Project 2025, they call for the privatization of the hurricane forecasting system, which would mean you’d have to pay for good information about where hurricanes were coming. Donald Trump, when he was last president, tried to cut disaster relief in FEMA by as much as two-thirds. As we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, he also refused to send disaster relief to certain states based on whether the constituents had voted for him in sufficient numbers. This is really a recipe for disaster, because in any four-year period it’s likely that extreme weather is going to intensify.
And while I do think that the green transition is likely to continue at some speed under a Trump presidency, I think that there will be much less humane response from the federal government to disasters like these and much less proactively spent and invested in adaptation and preparation, which is really what we need. We can’t only be rushing to the scene of a disaster after it hits. We need to be able to prepare those communities, which is to say all American communities, ahead of time for what’s coming. Asheville is a perfect example of this. FEMA has actually, I think, done a relatively good job, all of the conspiracy theories notwithstanding. But a community that is hit without preparation is going to be devastated.
That’s what it means to be living in a world defined by weather we have not seen for all of human history. And that is the experience that we’re having now. The climate that we’re living in now is unprecedented in all of human history. That means unprecedented risks, unprecedented hazards. We need to be preparing for those ahead of time as though they are unprecedented, not as though they are just normal weather, which is how many on the Republican side of the aisle want to see them.
AMY GOODMAN: And before, Manuel Ivan Guerrero, you go, I wanted to ask you, in Orlando, as a student at UCF, if these catastrophes, this one hurricane, Helene, after another, Milton, following up on this question around the presidential election, how it’s affected young people in the swing — I mean, we’re talking about swing states of North Carolina, the key state of Florida.
MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: It’s been very disconcerting for young people. Also, I just lost power, if you didn’t notice from the lighting change. We just — like, on air. But it’s been very disconcerting to lots of young people to see. And it’s been — it has been very stimulating for those conversations. I hear many of the people on my floor who stayed for the hurricane, who don’t usually talk about the election, talking about the way that this has been mismanaged and the way that this is so concerning, the fact that we had two hurricanes in two weeks, and the way that it’s affected our schooling and it’s affected, like, the people that we know and our family members that live in Tampa, and all of those things. And that’s really had people conversing about the election and really talking about the effects of these climate disasters and the way it’s going to affect our communities and our families and our futures.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Manuel Ivan Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, University of Central Florida, organizer with the Sunrise Movement. Even though your electricity went out, your lights went out, you shed great light on the subject. And, David Wallace-Wells, please stay with us, New York Times opinion writer. We’ll link to your new piece, “Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene,” author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth. But as we talk about evacuations and who gets saved and who doesn’t, we’re going to go to Immokalee to talk about Florida farmworkers, and we’re going to look at the prisons of these hard-hit states. The prisoners, are they protected? Back in 20 seconds.