Melissa Hanson, a climate advocate who recently moved from wildfire-prone California to Asheville, North Carolina, writes:

Asheville was supposed to be one of those places where people were safer from climate disasters. It was listed in the top three cities in this country to escape climate impacts. It’s not Florida, where sea level rise threatens to drown coastal communities, or California, with its wildfires, or Arizona, battered with its record-breaking heat waves. But now I know firsthand that no place is safe from the climate crisis.

This disaster is a direct result of our failure to address the climate crisis. We must connect the dots between the images of houses floating away and the policies that support fossil fuels. And we need to think about how the people waiting in line for drinkable water are going to need to wait in line in just over a month for the election. Because our votes will matter enormously for the future of our country and our planet.

I will be voting for Kamala Harris. She has vowed to take action on the climate crisis and has a long history of holding big polluters accountable. Meanwhile Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a “scam.” He has told Big Oil executives that if they donated $1 billion to his campaign, he will do their bidding. He has worked with the people behind Project 2025, which calls for gutting the National Weather Service—the very agency that allowed my family to prepare for the storm. Without their warnings, we wouldn’t have stocked up on water and food, and more of my neighbors would have died.

One candidate has a plan to address the crisis that caused Helene; the other plans to ignore it entirely. [Continue reading…]