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hurricane milton
Hurricane Don: The Nightmare Storm Scenario Under Four More Years of Trump
Rolling back every shred of climate progress and propping up rich polluters is going to make matters much worse for Georgia, Florida, and every other state on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
Oct 27, 2024
It’s 2029. JD Vance has been president for six months following Donald Trump’s second term in office. You’re waking up in a storm shelter in Georgia. You cowered all night as Hurricane Don smashed its way across the state.
You open the door to utter devastation—buildings destroyed, whole communities washed away, hundreds of people dead or missing.
Despite its Category 5 strength, Hurricane Don hit the Atlantic coast with little warning. Several years earlier, following the Project 2025 blueprint, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was privatized. Hurricane hunter planes were scrapped because they were unprofitable. And satellite data was sold to the highest bidder.
Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.
Without NOAA forecasts, countless people were caught unprepared. They chose not to evacuate and tried to protect their homes.
In the days and weeks that follow, you realize that the federal government is not coming to help.
In line with Project 2025, emergency response activities were transferred to state and local governments. Federal disaster preparation grants have been eliminated. And the National Flood Insurance Program was wound down, leaving only the rich and lucky few who have private insurance with the ability to rebuild.
This was the consequence of electing Donald Trump and the fruition of his Project 2025’s extreme anti-people, pro-polluter agenda.
But there was more. Following through on his campaign promise, Trump delivered an oil and gas development frenzy with more fracking, more pipelines, and a battle plan to “drill, drill, drill.”
And Trump made quick work following through on his promise to oil executives that he’d block or reverse any environmental law they wanted if they donated $1 billion to his campaign.
Between 2025 and 2028, President Trump appointed two more justices to the Supreme Court. With an 8-1 conservative hegemony, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had no authority at all to address greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the court rejected that climate change was even real.
As a result, all federal agencies were left unable to address any impact of climate change. Superstorms, extreme wildfires, category 5 hurricanes have become the new normal.
Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.
We just saw Hurricane Milton intensify in the Gulf of Mexico at one of the fastest rates ever on record. It finally slammed into Florida as a powerful Category 3 storm, leaving at least 24 people dead, more than 3 million without power, spawning dozens of tornadoes and creating a once-in-a-thousand-year rain event.
Two weeks earlier, Hurricane Helene brought a 1,000-year rainfall event to North Carolina and Georgia. It was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina, leaving at least 230 people dead across six states and carving a path of destruction as much as 500 miles from any coastline.
Milton’s rapid intensification and Helene’s immense rainfall surprised some observers but both storms exemplify the effects of global heating driven primarily by digging up and burning fossil fuels.
For decades, scientists have predicted the increasing strength of such storms as governments fail to stop fossil fuel expansion and the planet keeps getting hotter. Continuing to burn ever more oil, gas, and coal means warmer oceans and warmer air. Warmer oceans provide immense energy that intensifies storms. Warming air holds more moisture, bringing heavier rainfall.
Rolling back every shred of climate progress and propping up rich polluters is going to make matters much worse for Georgia, Florida, and every other state on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Storms of the century will increasingly become storms of every few years—same goes for heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods—with little relief or recovery in sight.
And Trump’s reckless plans to pull out of the Paris agreement again and throw sand in the gears of the international climate negotiations threatens world leaders’ long-overdue agreement last year to “transition away from fossil fuels.”
In a year of climate extremes, we’ve learned that nowhere is safe on a heating planet.
Hurricanes will keep happening, as they always have. But when you emerge after 2029’s Hurricane Don, do you want a government that acts on science to protect people and planet, making polluters pay for their destruction? Or one that sacrifices our lives and livelihoods to the highest bidder?
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Helene and Milton Conspiracy Theories Have Roots in the Real Plot Against Nature
The modern state’s drive to dominate the environment and its rich history of accumulation by dispossession are the prototypes and contexts for ideas that the U.S. government can control hurricanes.
Oct 21, 2024
The recent natural disasters caused by the Helene and Milton tropical cyclones in the Southern U.S. have triggered unfounded and ill-informed conspiracies about the origin of the disasters and the government’s involvement in weather modification. Despite being based on ill-informed claims that defy common sense, these conspiracies have historical contexts.
In a broader sense, the modern state’s drive to dominate nature and its rich history of accumulation by dispossession are the prototypes and contexts for such conspiracies. Environmental conspiracies have long been an integral part of the larger conspiracy against nature, which treat nature as a cornucopia of resources external to human identity and society that must be dominated to maximize its utility.
Environmental conspiracies have long served the interests of power structures, enabling them to control people and societies by dominating nature. These false claims have significantly shaped modern Western techno-bureaucratic approaches to nature and the environment. Interestingly, many of the dominant misguided claims were not propagated by ordinary people but by epistemic circles within the state apparatus, including scientists, ecologists, geographers, and naturalists who were and are part of the bureaucratic and technical machinery of the colonial or neocolonial states.
The rhetoric and discourse about the “brutality,” “ferocity,” or “violence,” of nature imply the pressing necessity for the state to manage, regulate, and exert control over nature and natural processes.
One of the conspiracy theories surrounding recent natural disasters involves the alleged involvement of the U.S. federal government in controlling and harnessing these disasters for political and economic ends. Although this claim that the Biden administration has manipulated Hurricane Milton is ludicrous, the desire to exert control over nature and natural processes has long been the inspiration of the modern state and its techno-bureaucratic machinery, at least since the European Enlightenment. From the colonial state manipulating and altering ecological landscapes, socio-ecological practices, and dismantling traditional knowledge sources, to current efforts to manipulate and control planetary processes through techno-bureaucratic techniques, such as geoengineering and planetary management, the domination and control of nature have remained an active pursuit within the state’s or state-supported technocratic and epistemic circles. Control over nature is part of the rationalizing and moralizing mandate of the modern state.
Embedded in the works of influential Enlightenment thinkers was establishing mastery over nature. This maxim provided a clear intellectual foundation for the systematic and cumulative progression in the understanding of nature through the means and tools of natural sciences within the epistemological fabrics of empiricism. Francis Bacon, an early Enlightenment philosopher, advocated for scientists to meticulously observe and accurately measure natural processes to gain mastery over them. He also proposed that the government should financially support these scientific pursuits to achieve such mastery. Consequently, in tandem with the progress in natural science, Western colonial and post-colonial states financed and endorsed scientific, and at times pseudo-scientific, undertakings to exert dominance over nature.
Colonial Fabrications
Although Bacon proposed a methodical approach to gathering evidence, involving a continuous interaction between theory and evidence, in the colonies, the European colonial states couldn’t afford to postpone their loot and plunder for the sake of a time-consuming scientific process or exert their power over nature and people. Instead, they resorted to ecological conspiracies and ill-informed theories to justify and rationalize their socio-ecological intervention and domination.
During colonial rule in al-Maghrib, French colonial ecologists expounded ecological conspiracies that gained widespread acceptance as scientific facts, even to an extent today. Drawing on biblical narratives, they claimed that the Sahara Desert had once been a fertile and lush geography that had served as the Roman Empire’s granary. They further doubled down on the conspiracy and blamed the native people’s social and ecological practices for transforming the once lush region into the arid Sahara. Scientifically, there is no evidence suggesting that the Sahara Desert was green during the Roman Empire. Contrary to the colonial ecologists’ claim, recent scientific evidence indicates that the Saharan region was just as arid and harsh at the end of the last Ice Age as it is today.
India essentially served as a testing ground for British colonial “experts” to validate and perpetuate their ecological conspiracies and schemes and violence against nature.
The environmental conspiracy provided a convenient excuse for colonial powers to justify their oppression and domination by blaming the natives for an imagined ecological catastrophe. It also justified European dominance and invasions by claiming a historical responsibility to restore the Sahara to its original fertile state, which they portrayed as a region that could once again supply Europe with agricultural goods. This justification not only upheld European colonial control but also moralized and materialized their plunders by dispossessing Indigenous people of their lands and resources.
In South Asia, the colonial administrators, experts, and operatives faced the challenge of dealing with unpredictable rivers, especially those originating from the Himalayas. They devised environmental conspiracies that long served as scientific claims. In Northern India, facing persistent failure to contain and control the flow of the Indus and other mighty rivers for centralizing irrigation practices, British colonial experts wrongly attributed the frequent destructive floods in the upper Indus Valley to the obstruction of the rivers by glaciers in their upper regions. Lacking evidence, they based their speculative scientific claims on their knowledge of European rivers.
Environmental conspiracies by the colonial British in India were mostly due to the unscientific socialization of colonial experts. Many of these experts, such as ecologists, hydro- and civil- engineers, and geographers, were not trained as scientists but rather as soldiers, military officers, or colonial operatives. Their roles as scientists in India were more out of necessity, primarily driven by the need to assert control over nature by manipulating socio-ecological practices to maximize economic plunder. As a result, these colonial agents engaged in extensive and unregulated ecological experimentation, which resulted in numerous human tragedies such as floods, famines, and diseases. India essentially served as a testing ground for British colonial “experts” to validate and perpetuate their ecological conspiracies and schemes and violence against nature.
U.S. Misinformation
Environmental conspiracies and conspiracies against nature for ecological and social exploitation were not confined to 19th-century European colonial powers; similar ideas flourished in the United States as well. James Espy, the first official American meteorologist, lobbied Congress for funding to burn forests of Appalachia in hopes of inducing rain. A storm enthusiast, much like today’s amateur storm chasers, Espy initially worked as a schoolteacher before he devoted himself to studying storms. He believed that burning forests could trigger rain.
Although Congress ultimately declined to back Espy’s proposal, it did allocate funds for Robert Dyrenforth’s rain theory. In the late 19th century, the Senate approved funding for Dyrenforth, a former Civil War general and an engineer by profession, who proposed that creating loud noises through explosives in the atmosphere could agitate clouds and cause them to release rain. Drawn from his experiences during the war, Dyrenforth’s idea was a bold attempt to manipulate weather patterns.
After his experiment of tossing dry ice into the cloud at the Schenectady airport in New York caused a cloud to dissipate and turn into rain, Irving announced in joy that mankind finally learned how to control the weather.
In the summer of 1891, Dyrenforth and his team of rainmaking enthusiasts, which included a meteorologist from the Smithsonian Institute and a college professor, embarked on a series of experiments by waging several attacks against the atmosphere. They launched an all-out assault on the sky detonating blasting dynamite, firing mortar shells, igniting smoke bombs, flying electrified kites, setting off oxy-hydrogen balloons, and even unleashing a spectacular array of fireworks. The intention was to manipulate the natural process of rainmaking.
Controlling the atmospheric dynamics in the United States has not been the hobby or fixation of weather enthusiasts. Scientists equally contributed to the fascination of dominating and controlling the atmosphere. During the initial years of the Cold War, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Irving Langmuir claimed to have developed a method of harnessing and controlling hurricanes. After his experiment of tossing dry ice into the cloud at the Schenectady airport in New York caused a cloud to dissipate and turn into rain, Irving announced in joy that mankind finally learned how to control the weather. Around this time, weather manipulation became a strategic goal during the Cold War. The political and geopolitical landscape of the era compelled the two superpowers to engage scientists and harness scientific advancements to manipulate weather and nature for their strategic objectives and goals.
Against Nature
These examples could easily, and also rightly, be viewed as anecdotal. However, beyond these specific instances, there exists a common and overarching ontological premise that has led to various scientific and pseudo-scientific experiments. Moreover, this premise also influences popular environmental conspiracies and techno-bureaucratic/epistemic conspiracies against nature. The premise is the aspiration to dominate nature. Although Irving was indeed a bright scientist, the setting of his experiment parallels those of colonial scientists—or so-called scientists—active in regions like al-Maghrib and South Asia. They all sought to assert control over natural processes. In the 21st century, amid ongoing ecological crises, this mission has broadened its scope to include the manipulation and management of global planetary systems and processes.
The enabling context for popular environmental conspiracies, such as those that emerged following the two tropical cyclones in the southern United States, is an overarching reductionist, simplistic, and anthropocentric understanding of nature. It isn’t, however, an outlook born from the minds of everyday individuals; rather, it reflects a deeper understanding of modern civilization rooted in the logic of the modern state, influenced by Enlightenment ideals. It is further implemented through the techno-bureaucratic apparatus of the state that aims to realize the state’s legal and moral duty of monopolizing violence, whether caused by humans or nature. The rhetoric and discourse about the “brutality,” “ferocity,” or “violence,” of nature imply the pressing necessity for the state to manage, regulate, and exert control over nature and natural processes.
Nature is not an external entity out there to be controlled and dominated. On the contrary, it is a complicated self-regulating and self-perpetuating collection of processes, elements, and mechanisms, where humans are as much a part of it as non-human living and non-living elements. Although contemporary humans, through their advanced material-technological culture, can manipulate various aspects of nature, we—along with our political and social structures, including the state—often struggle to predict or design the outcomes of such interventions.
Nature is an agent of its own. It can reset the disruptions and offsets caused by humans. How this happens remains a mystery. Although we can understand its processes to some extent, the reactions and resetting mechanisms are ultimately unknown. This highlights an important lesson for modern humanity, especially for the power structures: Rather than trying to manage, regulate, or control the planetary processes, we must focus on minimizing our footprints and encroachment into the boundaries of nature now more than ever.
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Elect Leaders Who Will Act on the Climate Crisis—and the Mental Health Crisis It Fuels
It’s clear that Trump isn’t concerned about helping disaster victims and that with an exponentially warming climate, we will continue to see increased extreme weather events and consequently more victims in need of support.
Oct 21, 2024
I was 10 years old when Hurricane Sandy hit my home city of Baltimore, Maryland. I remember vividly my family all sleeping in the living room together, towels covering the floor to soak up the water that seeped into our house from unexpected places. I remember watching the storm from the dining room window and seeing a tree fall—just missing my next-door neighbor, who was outside in the storm. There were 72 direct deaths as a result of Hurricane Sandy in the Mid-Atlantic region alone.
Sandy was only a Category 1 Hurricane when it hit Baltimore, but it was seared into my mind as one of the scariest events of my life. It was also one of the first times I felt unsafe—even though I was at home and under the watch of my parents.
In the span of 12 days, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and surrounding states were hit with not one, but two deadly hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Milton, that were far more destructive and traumatic than the one that I experienced 12 years ago. So far, it has been recorded that more than 250 people have died as a result of Hurricane Helene and Milton. There are still over a million people without power, or access to food, water, and shelter.
Extreme weather is killing people long after the weather event is over.
The destruction from a hurricane or any extreme weather event doesn’t just end when the power lines are restored and the schools open again. To most victims, the physical rebuilding is only the beginning of the recovery process. The rest remains invisible to everyone else.
Survivors of hurricanes grapple with losing family members and neighbors, homes, and local businesses like cafés and movie theaters that make their communities special. It isn’t hard to understand why the climate crisis and mental health crisis go hand in hand.
Currently, our rates of mental illness—especially that of young adults—are at an all-time high. It has been shown that suicide rates in the two years after a hurricane significantly increase by 31%. And this doesn’t account for the effect of extreme weather on the exacerbation of PTSD, substance abuse disorders, depression, and other mental illnesses. Extreme weather is killing people long after the weather event is over.
Climate change in general can have a detrimental impact on mental health—especially for young people. In a survey of more than 10,000 children and young people around the world, almost half stated that their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life and functioning. As Dr. Britt Wray writes in her book, Generation Dread, young people’s distress is also “linked to perceptions of government betrayal and being lied to by leaders who are taking inadequate climate action while pretending otherwise.”
It is crucial, now more than ever, that we elect leaders who will fight climate change and all the destruction it causes to our communities, homes, minds, and spirits.
While in office, former U.S. President Donald Trump withheld disaster and emergency aid multiple times—initially refusing wildfire assistance in California in 2018, withholding wildfire assistance to Washington in 2020, and refusing hurricane disaster funds to Puerto Rico in 2017, all because he didn’t receive political support from those places. And he continues to invest in the companies that are fueling this extreme weather.
It’s clear that Trump isn’t concerned about helping disaster victims, and it’s also clear that with an exponentially warming climate, we will continue to see increased extreme weather events and consequently more victims in need of support.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, understands the urgency of tackling the climate crisis while also recognizing that investing in technologies of the future can fuel economic growth.
In fact, with the Biden administration, she’s created over 300,000 new clean energy jobs through the Inflation Reduction Act and spurred a clean-energy manufacturing boom, all while investing billions in climate resilience—making sure that victims and potential victims are supported by the federal government even before a disaster happens. She has also prioritized tackling the youth mental health crisis, announcing $285 million earlier this year for schools to hire 14,000 mental health counselors to give students the support they need to thrive.
What America needs, now more than ever, are leaders who will take climate change and the mental health crisis seriously, and who will assist anyone who is victimized by extreme weather, not just those who are politically like-minded. That’s why we should elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
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