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Winning should be a breeze for Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the other Democratic candidates. What's going on?
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit—all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy—this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
The Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
By couching controversial ideas in the language of moderation and common sense, politicians can make even the most radical departures from the status quo seem like natural, logical steps.
In the wake of the recent vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, political commentators have been abuzz with praise for Vance's performance. Many have both lauded and critiqued his ability to "sane wash" the extremist positions of his running mate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, presenting them in a more palatable, even respectable light. This phenomenon, while concerning in its own right, reveals a deeper and more insidious problem within our political discourse—one that extends far beyond the bounds of the Republican ticket.
JD Vance, the bestselling author turned venture capitalist turned politician, took to the debate stage with a clear mission: to repackage the Trump agenda in a way that would appeal to a broader audience. Gone were the inflammatory rhetoric and bombastic declarations that have become Trump's hallmark. In their place, Vance offered measured tones, appeals to compassion, and a veneer of reasonableness that seemed designed to make even the most controversial policies sound sensible.
On issues ranging from gun control to abortion rights, Vance demonstrated a remarkable ability to soften hard-line positions. When pressed
on gun violence, for instance, he spoke eloquently about the pain of victims' families while offering little in the way of substantive policy changes. His approach to abortion rights was similarly evasive, distancing himself from previous statements supporting a national ban while framing the issue in terms of supporting mothers.
Vance's measured tone and appeals to shared values made it all too easy to forget the often extreme positions he was defending.
This strategy of "sane-washing"—presenting extreme positions in a more moderate light—is not new. However, Vance's skillful execution of it has drawn particular attention. Many observers have praised his debate performance as a masterclass in political communication, noting how he managed to make the Trump-Vance ticket seem more reasonable and mainstream than it has in the past.
But while Vance's ability to reframe contentious issues may be impressive from a purely tactical standpoint, it raises serious concerns about the nature of political discourse and the ease with which potentially harmful policies can be dressed up as common sense solutions.
What many critics of Vance's performance have failed to recognize, however, is that his approach is not unique to the political right. In fact, the strategy of "sane-washing" has long been a staple of centrist politics, employed by both liberals and conservatives to make policies that support free-market capitalism and the military-industrial complex appear "reasonable," "evidence-driven," and "moderate."
This centrist playbook has been used time and again to justify interventionist foreign policies, austerity measures, and the gradual erosion of social safety nets. By framing these positions in terms of fiscal responsibility, national security, or economic necessity, centrist politicians have long managed to present policies that often disproportionately harm the most vulnerable members of society as necessary evils or even positive goods.
The danger of this approach lies in its effectiveness. By couching controversial ideas in the language of moderation and common sense, politicians can make even the most radical departures from the status quo seem like natural, logical steps. This has the effect of shifting the entire political spectrum, making previously unthinkable positions seem reasonable by comparison.
In the case of the Walz-Vance debate, we saw this dynamic play out in real-time. Vance's measured tone and appeals to shared values made it all too easy to forget the often extreme positions he was defending. His ability to present Trump's immigration policies, for instance, as simple common sense measures to protect American workers and communities obscured the often harsh and divisive realities of these approaches.
The art of political sane-washing, as demonstrated by JD Vance and countless centrist politicians before him, is a powerful tool. It can make the unpalatable seem reasonable, the extreme seem moderate. In the end, the greatest danger may not be the openly extreme positions that shock us into action, but the quietly radical ideas presented as common sense that lull us into complacency.
This is particularly concerning in an era of increasing political polarization and economic inequality. As the gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of society continues to widen, and as issues like climate change and systemic racism demand urgent and transformative action, the last thing we need is a political discourse that makes maintaining the status quo seem like the most reasonable option.
Collective action serves as the cornerstone for replacing the illusory sanity of the current political landscape with policies that are truly sane.
As this debate fades into memory and the election season progresses, the imperative becomes clear: Progress necessitates more than merely exposing the facade of "common sense" extremism. It requires the cultivation of radical movements capable of articulating and advocating for genuinely transformative change. These movements must emerge from grassroots organizing, uniting diverse communities, labor unions, environmental activists, and social justice advocates. Together, they can forge a vision of society that transcends the narrow boundaries of current political discourse.
The mission of these movements extends beyond challenging the status quo. They must present bold, innovative solutions to pressing societal issues. Their role is to imagine and demand a world where economic justice, racial equity, environmental sustainability, and authentic democracy are not abstract ideals but tangible realities. By building power from the ground up and amplifying marginalized voices, these movements can begin to redefine the limits of political possibility.
Collective action serves as the cornerstone for replacing the illusory sanity of the current political landscape with policies that are truly sane. This means prioritizing human needs and planetary health over profit and power. It involves creating systems that promote equality, ensure sustainability, and enhance overall societal well-being. These are not utopian dreams, but necessary steps towards a more just and liveable world.
In the face of political rhetoric that makes extreme positions appear reasonable, the answer lies in building movements that make truly reasonable positions into reality. This is the challenge and the opportunity that lies ahead—to transform the political landscape not through clever repackaging of harmful ideas, but through the hard work of creating and implementing policies that actually address the root causes of societal problems. Only then can the promise of a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous society for all be realized.
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading the Arab world that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.
A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.
It’s called the cease-fire ritual—a public display of handwashing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.
Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: It is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.
Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day cease-fire was “still on the table.”
As he was doing so, the U.S., France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that cease-fire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.
The U.S. simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good.” It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.
If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.
Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line—as the Pentagon has confirmed—is that the U.S. supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and cease-fire plans can go hang.
The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighborhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.
This macabre dance serves a purpose: Virtually every media outlet in the Western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited”—precise commando raids that go in and come back out—just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.
“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a U.S. official toldThe Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., said: “The American administration… did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”
A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”
Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.
Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News gloated that “Nasrallah died in torment” amid reports that the Hezbollah leader had suffocated. The head of the Shlomi town council welcomed the ground invasion, saying: “It is necessary to cleanse the area.”
Political commentator Ben Caspit dreamed of the “day after” such a cleansing operation, suggesting that even the grandmothers of any fighter in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force who crossed back over the Litani River should “die at that moment.”
Funny he should mention the Litani River, whose name has often been invoked as the upper limit of southern Lebanon that Israel wants to clear of Hezbollah rockets—because that, too, is turning into a myth. The military ambitions of this operation go far deeper into Lebanon.
Barely 12 hours after the U.S. State Department said it had limited Israel’s operation, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon. “You must head immediately to the north of the al-Awali River,” near Sidon, army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X (formerly Twitter).
This indicates that Israel has claimed as its area of military operations the whole of southern Lebanon, almost one-third of the country. In a stroke, Israel doubled its area of operations.
This is in line with the promise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in the hours after Hamas’ attack a year ago.
“We are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas had struck on 7 October 2023.
Jared Kushner, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and real estate investor who has apparently spent hours studying Hezbollah and considers himself an expert on the subject, wrote similarly on X: “September 27 [the date of Nasrallah’s killing] is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough… Anyone who has been calling for a cease-fire in the North is wrong.
“There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.”
Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine.
After leading the liberation of southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation, and having led the battle against Israel in 2006, in Hezbollah’s eyes successfully, Nasrallah kept the northern border quiet for nearly two decades.
Under Nasrallah’s rule, Hezbollah was totally absorbed in another fight altogether: the civil war in Syria. This had many consequences. It downplayed the primacy of the struggle to liberate Palestine. And Hezbollah, as it grew in size and political importance, became easier for Israel’s Mossad to infiltrate.
Some of the major operations over the past month, such as the supply of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, were years in the making. The exact locations of Hezbollah’s bunkers, and the movement of targets between them, were also the result of years of work and research.
None of what transpired to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah was unprepared, which is why it contrasts so dramatically with the difficulties Israel has experienced in attempting to decapitate Hamas in Gaza.
But Israel was also helped by Hezbollah and Iran’s “strategic patience,” or their lack of response to its mounting attacks on their commanders and leaders. Hezbollah never took revenge for the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the leader of its military wing. Nor did it reply in kind to the assassination of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri earlier this year in its heartland of Dahiyeh in Beirut.
The meekness of the response from Hezbollah and Iran only gave Israel the confidence to redouble its blows on Lebanon and Syria.
Every time this happened, both Hezbollah and Iran went out of their way to say they did not want to start a war with Israel; and that their campaign was in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza and would stop the moment a cease-fire was reached.
And when they did strike, it was generally, although not exclusively, on Israeli military targets. Hezbollah’s rockets and propaganda videos were demonstrative, designed to show its power, not to use it.
In hindsight, this strategy has proved to be a strategic mistake, for which Hezbollah is paying today—because it gave Israel the confidence to do what it is now doing to Lebanon.
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah have outnumbered Hezbollah’s replies by five to one.
This is not just the miscalculation of those who are routinely dubbed hardliners in Lebanon and Iran. Reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he was lied to by the Americans, who promised a cease-fire in Gaza if Iran could restrain itself from replying to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran.
It was the failure of Iran’s strategic restraint that led on Tuesday night to the bombardment of more than 180 missiles on targets across Israel. After the attack, Pezeshkian still maintained that Iran did not seek a war with Israel, but the policy of restraint has clearly been dumped. One can expect Hezbollah and all armed groups in Yemen and Iraq to be more active.
But an even bigger miscalculation is being made by Israel in its desire to strike while the iron is hot.
Israel is reengineering the entire Middle East to hate it, while the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. It is reverse engineering a period of three decades, since the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian conflict lost its supremacy and centrality in the Arab world.
Nothing is doing more than Israel’s untamed aggression to heal the deep divisions in the Arab world created by the counter-revolution to the Arab Spring.
When you drop 80 tonnes of explosives to kill Nasrallah and kill 300 others in doing so, you move him from being a symbol of resistance to a legend.
“The symbol is gone, the legend is born, and the resistance continues,” was how Lebanese politician Suleiman Frangieh, a scion of one of the country’s leading Maronite families, put it.
Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of Al Akhbar, a newspaper close to Hezbollah, compared Nasrallah to Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who is regarded as the third imam in Shia Islam.
He wrote: “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah did not imagine himself in the image of Hussain when he fell as a martyr. He is not in Hussain’s position when the world has let him down. Rather, he is in the image of Hussain who got up and fought in defence of a right that the cost of collecting is very high… [Nasrallah] has become an eternal symbol for every rebel in the face of injustice, and… he was martyred in defense of Jerusalem and Palestine.”
Nasrallah had a charismatic appeal as an orator to his Shia constituency and the pro-Palestinian masses in the Arab world, in the same way that former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had for the Arab nationalist movement in his time.
In death, Nasrallah promises to do that much.
Of course, this is not the view of the Arab elites who have spent so much of their careers cozying up to the U.S. and Israel. But even they have to acknowledge the passions coursing through their people.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used Israel as a path to being taken seriously by Washington. But even he is brutally candid about his limits as a leader.
“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 39-year-old ruler reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”
A Saudi official disputed this account of Mohammed bin Salman’s conversation with Blinken, but it bears the ring of truth.
Yes, the region is being redesigned by an Israel that has broken its leash.
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading them that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.
This will have profound strategic consequences for the future. So is Nasrallah’s death truly an “unalloyed good” for the region?
Beware what you wish for, because it just may happen.
We’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals.
If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:
Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.
But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).
I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.
Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are deadare dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.
But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).
Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning
“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”
In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.
All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin.We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).
This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.
The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”
In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.
If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).
The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.