As research finds that the deadly Hurricane Helene was greatly exacerbated by global warming, Donald Trump is continuing to deny the climate crisis and court donations from the industry most responsible for planetary heating. Environmentalists worry that he will also gut flood protections and climate policy if he wins November’s presidential election.
Hours before Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday night as a major category 4 hurricane, Trump baselessly said nuclear “warming”, not the climate crisis, is “the warming that you’re going to have to be very careful with”. The following day, he said the “little hurricane” was partially responsible for attendees leaving his rallies early.
As the hurricane continued to ravage the region over the weekend, the former president dismissed global warming in a Saturday speech, and the following day referred to the climate crisis as “one of the great scams of all time”.
Helene has now killed more than 150 people across the region.
On Tuesday in Wisconsin, Trump incorrectly said that under the “green new scam”, Democrats “wanted to rip down all the buildings in Manhattan and they wanted to rebuild them without windows”. No environmental plans included removing windows from buildings, though Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act did include incentives for replacing windows with more energy-efficient models.
A preliminary study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, published on Monday night, found that climate change caused 50% more rainfall during the hurricane in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.
“It’s obscene that communities … are suffering and dying from the reality of the climate emergency while Donald Trump denies that it even exists,” said Brett Hartl, political director at the environmental non-profit Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.
When Trump visited hurricane-ravaged Georgia on Monday, he said: “We’re here today to stand with complete solidarity with the people of Georgia and all those suffering in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene.” But he is now headed back to the campaign trail to court donations from the fossil fuel industry, which accounts for over 75% of all planet-heating pollution and nearly 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
On Wednesday, Trump will attend two fundraisers in oil-rich Texas. First, he will hold an invite-only lunch in the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oilfield. Later, he’ll reportedly hold a Houston cocktail party co-hosted by Jeff Hildebrand, who runs Hilcorp Oil and has been a major donor to Trump since 2017.
Last week, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, also attended two fundraisers thrown by oil industry executives in Dallas and Fort Worth, before being forced to cancel two Georgia fundraisers due to the hurricane.
The events come months after Trump reportedly offered a brazen “deal” to oil bosses, proposing that they give him $1bn for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would shred dozens of environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, sparking congressional investigations.
Plans to gut emergency management
Trump has also come under fire for his ties to Project 2025, a wide-ranging policy blueprint from which he has tried to distance himself, but which was written by allies and previous advisers of his. The plan leave US communities with far fewer resources to rebuild after climate disasters.
If enacted, the plan would end the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (Fema) federal flood insurance program – the primary source of federal flood insurance across the country – and replace it with private insurance plans “starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program”.
The playbook calls for an end to Fema’s disaster preparedness grants. And it calls to break up and privatize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations and focus on providing data to private companies”, the plan says, referring to forecasts done by the National Weather Service, the country’s main source of weather forecasting which sends out warnings about disasters like Helene.
“While roads, bridges and entire towns are being washed away, Trump and Project 2025 plan to gut Fema and roadblock every agency from confronting the climate crisis,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Hartl.
Project 2025 additionally calls for a “review” of the National Hurricane Center, a division of the National Weather Service which provides warnings, forecasts and analysis on dangerous storms.
Data collected by the center should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”, the project says. But scientists have long warned that the climate crisis is strongly linked to increased hurricane intensity.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank that led Project 2025, said the plan “does not call for the elimination of NOAA, the NWS, or the NHC”.
“Rather than ‘cutting’ FEMA, Project 2025 is advocating for a realignment of the agency’s mission and focus – away from DEI and climate change initiatives and restoring it to that of helping people before, during, and after disasters,” the agency said.
But the proposal would slash protections for flood-affected communities. And it would also more broadly catalyze a dismantling of climate policy, including efforts to curb planet-heating emissions.
“Donald Trump just denied climate change for a week straight, is raising money from big oil billionaires tomorrow, and is planning to gut disaster aid with his Project 2025 agenda next year,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director for the climate-focused advocacy group Climate Power. “When American communities are devastated by extreme weather, Trump’s plan is to increase their suffering while handing out $110bn in tax breaks to big oil.”
