If there is a holiday which President George W. Bush is unlikely to forget, it is the one he took during August 2005. On the 29th of that month, Hurricane Katrina, spreading over 650 km and at speeds of over 200 km/hr, hit New Orleans. Mass destruction and unprecedented flooding ensued, resulting in over a thousand casualties and an estimated $100 billion in damages.
On that same day, Bush was enjoying the sun at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He would continue to do so for another 48 hours before flying back to Washington. Those days – between August 29th and 31st – may well have cost the Republican Party a win at the subsequent presidential elections. This might seem an overstatement, but it is undeniable that Bush’s slow reaction to Katrina was the final nail in the coffin for a leader who, following a botched invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, was already treading on thin ice. Bush’s attempts to appear empathetic backfired; rather, photos taken of him looking down from Air Force One onto a wrecked Louisiana conveyed the impression of a distant observer. Five years later, Bush would himself admit the indelicacy of this PR move, which portrayed him as ‘distant and uncaring’.
Weather, then, can be politically destructive. Now add climate into the mix. Climate is the long-term average of the weather at a particular location (usually measured over a thirty year period or longer). With climate change, weather patterns in the United States have become more volatile. Extreme weather events are becoming more commonplace in arid locations, and alarmingly now also appearing in regions where they were never witnessed before. The Californian wildfires of 2018, 2020, and 2021 were the most destructive on record, but this region has been prone to such incidents for decades. Texans would have been considerably more taken aback by the great freeze of February 2021, which deprived ten million inhabitants of electricity for days, with record lows of -19 degrees Celsius recorded in Dallas. The cold spell can be securely linked to a serious disturbance in the climate system: the polar jet stream, a circulating body of air which determines weather over much of the US, has – due to climate change – become more meandering. In extreme cases, such as in February 2021, pockets of the jet stream can even break away from its main body, and cause abnormal weather patterns.
To recap: extreme weather fuels political risk, and climate change amplifies the occurrence of extreme weather. Therefore climate should have significant influence on the 2024 presidential elections, right? Unfortunately, it seems that the logic might not be, well, so logical. Although episodes such as Katrina and the Texan freeze can destroy livelihoods and aggravate wealth inequality, the correlation between such consequences and a desired change of governance is tenuous. In practice, it seems climate change – and the management of its consequences – does not yet hold the power to shake a party’s grip over a state or city. New Orleans has been under Democrat leadership since 1872, an impressive streak unperturbed by the recently increased storm surge threat on the city. Similarly, Greg Abbott, the current (Republican) governor of Texas, successfully retained his place in office after the Texan freeze, and is set to run again in 2026.
Perhaps what climate needs to become a big political player is simply to associate itself to other big political players. Typically, the greatest concerns of US voters are immigration, the judicial system, and social issues such as abortion and race relations. And, of course, the real big hitter is the economy. No wonder, then, that climate gains political importance (only) when placed in relation to economics. Trump, for instance, denounced Biden’s environmental policies as ‘heartless and disloyal to the American worker’. He is not alone in seeing climate as a financially cumbersome obstacle: Vox, Spain’s far-right party, calls such policies ‘the return to caves and poverty’. In Britain, Rishi Sunak argues that they shouldn’t ‘unnecessarily give people more hassle and more costs in their lives’.
‘Worker’, ‘poverty’, and ‘costs’ are words which sound more like an economist’s lingo than a climatologist’s. Climate, on its own, does not yet stand its ground. It seems that the predicted increased occurrence of catastrophes such as Katrina is viewed (excessively) stoically by Americans; they remain challenges to recover from rather than risks to avert.