Will Helene Force Vance to Face Climate Crisis on the Debate Stage?

Tonight is the vice presidential debate and it’s likely the final debate of the election and the last opportunity for voters to see both tickets side-by-side. The backdrop will be the once-in-a-generation devastation of Hurricane Helene.

When Walz and Vance take the stage, tens of thousands of people won’t know if their loved ones are alive or if they have a home to go back to. Many more will just be beginning a recovery effort that will take years and cost an estimated $90 billion or more. And Helene is just one sign of the catastrophic destruction that climate change could bring.

We deserve some answers from these men who are running to be second in line to the presidency. CBS debate moderator Norah O'Donnell must ask both JD Vance and Tim Walz what their administrations would do to stop disasters like Helene from becoming the new normal. And, in particular, she needs to be ready to hold JD Vance accountable to actually delivering a response.

With the backdrop of Helene, O'Donnell has an opportunity to show a different path tonight. She can ask strong questions and be ready with facts to hold Vance accountable.

The reality is that our politicians are not confronting the climate crisis at the scale and speed that science and justice demand. Our Vice President is boasting about record oil and gas production in a time when scientists have warned we must be decarbonizing as fast as possible. And her opponent, Donald Trump, is a climate denier who has promised oil and gas billionaires to do their bidding in exchange for a billion dollars. When the candidates were asked about climate change in the last debate, Trump entirely dodged the question, instead pivoting to an irrelevant tangent about auto-plants and tariffs, despite the fact that Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act actually created manufacturing jobs. ABC news moderators didn’t follow up or press the question.

In the year 2024 that doesn’t cut it. Scientists say we have just a handful of years left to stop catastrophic climate change. Helene’s apocalyptic nature is only a sign of the years to come. That makes the next four years of American politics an absolutely critical time for bold climate policy. We could be investing in resilient renewable electricity grids, updating our bridges and our roads, and making sure our homes and infrastructure are ready for disaster. We could be restoring wetlands, mangroves, and forests; expanding FEMA; and building a workforce that is ready to respond to disasters. And above all, we need to decarbonize our economy as fast as humanly possible.

But looking at media coverage, you’d hardly know the urgency of the climate crisis. The vast majority of media coverage of disasters like Helene doesn’t identify climate change as a factor. Even when broadcast news does talk about climate change, only 12% of the time do they mention burning fossil fuels as the problem. And in a bizarre attempt at neutrality, climate deniers in the Republican Party are regularly platformed without being fact-checked or held accountable for their lies.

With the backdrop of Helene, O'Donnell has an opportunity to show a different path tonight. She can ask strong questions and be ready with facts to hold Vance accountable. She should have on hand statements from JD Vance outlining his denial of human-caused climate change—a sharp reversal from his status as a green tech investor just a few years ago. She should be ready to cite opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark green energy bill that invests $12 billion in Ohio’s green energy economy and has created good, union jobs.

In a time when we face unprecedented disaster, we need our media institutions to be a source of truth and honesty and to be ready to hold those in power accountable. The tens of thousands of people who have lost their homes to Helene, the people who have had to evacuate from wildfires, the elderly and young people who have died from heat waves, the young people who are scared for their future—we are owed answers.