Sitting inside the press room at the CBS Broadcast Center on Tuesday night, I wondered if viewers at home — that is, those that have power right now, after the devastating Hurricane Helene — were getting anything out of the vice presidential debate. Surrounded by journalists largely half-listening while scrolling Twitter, I watched Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) talk over anchors Margaret Brennan and Norah O'Donnell, and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) awkwardly answer questions about exactly when he visited Hong Kong.
There was yet more racist discussion of immigrants, even though, as Gov. Walz noted, “illegal” border crossings are at the lowest rates in 4 years. The first full question was about bombing Iran; both candidates stated their full-bore support for Israel’s “ability to defend itself.” The second question was about climate change. I thought about the six protesters with the youth-led Sunrise Movement who were arrested outside of CBS headquarters earlier that day, demanding that the moderators commit to asking a question about the parties’ plans to combat the ongoing effects of the climate crisis.
I also thought about a phrase I heard on TikTok that seemingly originated on Twitter: basically, the climate crisis is something you’ll see in videos on your phone until it’s on your doorstep. The exception to this is those of us who have already consciously lived through climate disasters, which is a lot of us — more of us than maybe care to admit it, or even see it as such. It feels like my life has been marked by once-in-a-lifetime storms. This week, I watched another on my phone as homes floated away in Asheville, North Carolina, roads disintegrated like ash, towns wiped from the face of the earth in ungodly moments of flash flood.
“I’m only 26, and I'm just tired of living through historic unprecedented events, especially when it comes to the climate and stuff,” said one Tiktok user showing viewers the scene in Asheville. “And the fact that none of our presidential candidates are running anything even close to any pro-climate policy? Yes fracking, we need more fracking; we need more AI data centers,” she added sarcastically, “as we have literally historic flooding.”
Multiple states are still searching for bodies in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 130 people. Hurricane survivors have been accused of “looting” while trying to find the supplies they need to survive the total devastation. Already, news coverage is blaming “migrants” for looting, even though migrants were among those expected to risk their lives on the job for capitalist production during the storm.
In Tennessee, workers at a facility owned by Impact Plastics were caught in the flash flooding while at work; one family member of a missing person alleged to independent outlet the Tennessee Holler, “The bosses left, but employees were told not to leave.” (According to the Guardian, Impact Plastics confirmed “there were missing and deceased employees as well as a contractor,” and denied that managers told workers not to leave. Teen Vogue reached out to Impact Plastics for comment.)
Amid the floodwaters, the slow return to phone service and technology, the lack of resources, people tagged government representatives all the way up to President Joe Biden for acknowledgment of the conditions in which they were stuck. There is a meme I often return to in times like this, with kudos to whoever made it, that reads: “Sorry! We don’t have any money for keeping people alive, we allocated the entire budget to making people dead.”
The joke is especially unfunny with CSPAN clips floating around of Biden telling a reporter that the federal government had “given everything [they have]” to Hurricane Helene survivors. “Pleading poverty as they ship $8.7 billion to Israel,” commented one user, to over 100,000 likes, referring to an aid package Israel secured from the U.S. in military funding days ago.
Israel’s war on Gaza has spread to the bombing of Lebanon (with what CNN reported were likely U.S.-made bombs), where over 700 people have been killed since September 23. As of Monday, the U.S. is sending thousands of troops to the Middle East “to bolster security and to defend Israel if necessary,” per the Pentagon.
The interconnectedness of movements for climate, against war and colonialism, is by necessity, not choice. Among the locations flooded by Helene is Atlanta, Georgia, where the storm broke the city’s rainfall record last set in 1886. Writer and past Teen Vogue contributor Hannah Riley observed that Atlanta was under both a boil water advisory and a shelter-in-place order – due to a fire at a chemical plant on Sunday that spread chemicals into the air – that some might never hear about because of the power outages from Helene.
“Atlanta’s flooding is worsening, yet the city is still using $67 million in taxpayer funds to pave over 300 acres of forest wetlands — national sponges for rainwater — to construct a large police compound for officers trained in Israel,” one TikTok user wrote. Atlanta organizers have spent years organizing against the construction of the compound, which they’ve dubbed “Cop City;” as Prism reported in 2023, organizers have previously called attention to the partnership between the Israeli Defense Forces and Atlanta police, who participate in an exchange training program. (There are planned or proposed “cop cities” in Wisconsin, New York, Texas, and on and on.) “Climate justice is tied to racial justice and anti-imperialism,” the TikTok concluded.
That message was recently echoed by former Teen Vogue cover star Greta Thunberg in a video promoting a campaign she recently endorsed to boycott the oil company Chevron. “In Palestine and all over the world, the fight against colonialism and corporations’ destruction of the planet are intrinsically linked,” Thunberg opened. “As Israel bombs hospitals, homes and schools in Gaza, Chevron provides them with energy through two Israeli-claimed gas fields in the Mediterranean, making millions in the process.” (If you don’t get why Gen Z has such deep distrust for mainstream media, turning to TikTok instead, check out the sponsor on the op-ed Politico ran Monday about Helene titled “Nowhere is safe from climate disaster.”)
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Writer Lacy M. Johnson, founder of Houston, Texas’s Flood Museum – which memorializes the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 – took it a step further than a boycott, asking when we would “begin prosecuting fossil fuel companies and other major carbon emitters for the crime of climate homicides.”
The video message from Thunberg is a reminder that the climate impact of the war on Gaza has been felt for months already. According to the Guardian, “The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.” That report was from January. According to a March 2024 report from Inside Climate News, the failure of all of Gaza’s sewage processing plants in the first weeks of Israel’s attacks led to a public health crisis; Israel’s ongoing incursion is likely to cause the flow of that sewage into Israeli waterways. And as the warfare continues, in the Middle East, some 1,300 people died this summer due to heat, where the lack of water is set to worsen.
As the recent $8.7 billion in military aid sent to Israel makes clear, there is plenty of money, it’s just not going towards the things we actually need as a species. Defense contractors are doing just fine; the politicians who invest in them are, too, alleges U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). If it’s not going to warfare, it’s going to tech companies who’ve got the people in power all hyped up about AI and crypto, which are – you guessed it – also killing the planet.
Microsoft is reopening Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls the “most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,” to power its AI operation. Never mind the bad vibes of reopening the U.S. version of Chernobyl: The Washington Post’s Evan Halper told Vox’s Today, Explained that the power of the plant could fuel 800,000 homes. Bear in mind this is a country that doesn’t even have a nationalized right to energy in our homes, where people die every year in part from strapped power grids.
We have technology that could theoretically be used to, I don’t know, expand internet access for free, but it’s not being used to help anyone, it’s just being used to make things worse. You can have an electronic security feature on your door to help you feel safer, but without infrastructure to help you and your home survive these storms, it’ll be no use. The same tech companies that are fooling Americans into thinking “convenience” is improving their lives while the climate collapses are to blame for the tens of thousands of child laborers in places like the Congo mining for cobalt to make our smart phones and electric vehicles, driving conflict there.
People in power engage in warfare because it is profitable, and its continued existence keeps the cycle going by globally desensitizing us and traumatizing us. A storm can be a time to lose sight from grief; it can also show us who’s really with us — and who’s not. In the aftermath of Helene, I can’t stop thinking about the legacy a storm like this leaves forever, even when the news stops covering it. The way Hurricane Katrina created climate refugees because of the racist urban planning that placed the brunt of the storm on Black communities, who were abandoned and vilified in its wake. How Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, and it took public housing tenants years to have the black mold in their apartments addressed. How the power grid in Puerto Rico, seven years after Maria, sees regular blackouts.
Someone posted a photo they dated as post-Katrina of a woman holding a sign reading, “No Iraqis left me on a roof to die.” No Palestinians, no Lebanese, no Iranians, left Americans – the disabled who could not evacuate Helene, those who didn’t have time or a place to evacuate to, the resources to stock up on goods before it hit – to die in the flooding, either.
Walking through the spin room, I felt as far as ever from the spinning world around me, ensconced in bright lights and people in clothes that cost more than my rent I can’t even afford, candidate surrogates BS-ing to harried reporters. The people impacted by the winners and losers of this election couldn’t have been further away. I walked out to the Manhattan streets. I wondered when I’d feel my last cool October night in New York City.
Scientists believe climate change created a 50% increase in rainfall in Georgia and North Carolina during Hurricane Helene. The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) water center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama described Helene’s rainfall as “astronomical,” telling the A.P. the rainfall was unlike anything he’d seen “in [his] 25 years of working at the weather service.” Young people aren’t delusional. They know what’s coming. Do you?
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