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Climate Chaos and Conspiracy Theories [1]
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Date: 2024-10-09
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
More than a week has passed since Hurricane Helene destroyed a large portion of the Southeast United States, and in its wake a slew of disinformation about federal disaster relief and what caused the storm has spread across the internet.
While the people who started these rumors are absolutely guilty for bogging down hurricane relief with conspiracy theories, I cannot fault the people who believe them, because it’s true: this hurricane was totally, completely, unbelievable, so no wonder unbelievable theories have flourished.
Hurricane Helene flooded regions that were hundreds of miles from the coast. Mountain communities that used to get just a little bit of rain during hurricane season were pummeled.
That’s because climate change is heating up ocean waters and intensifying hurricanes, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It also causes more rainfall per hour, which is why flooding events are increasing. Climate change is making unbelievable weather events common.
In a country that still allows climate change to be talked about as if it itself is an unbelievable theory, it’s no surprise that conspiracies during extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene prevail.
But the way these theories have been reported on by various newsrooms would make you think the Southeast is full of a bunch of tinfoil quacks. The environmental publication Grist, for example, wrote that “the dark corners of society have long typecast [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] as a sinister, all-powerful boogeyman capable of the most outlandish and fiendish deeds.”
Yet, there are some disaster survivors (who I would not say are from the “dark corners of society”) that are totally correct in their skepticism of FEMA. The agency has long been underfunded so its direct disaster relief is often one-and-done: FEMA officials come in after the storm, provide immediate relief, and then leave, offering further assistance from afar.
Bureaucratic hurdles are emblematic of the longer-term FEMA aid process for many disaster survivors. In Vermont where flooding totally devastated many small towns last year, Senator Peter Welch has introduced a bill to audit what he calls “administrative bloat” at FEMA that causes inefficient spending of disaster money.
This history gives some of the conspiracies around Hurricane Helene, especially those related to government response, a glimmer of truth.
Yet instead of validating the concerns of hurricane survivors – whether they’re based in fact or not – much of the national conversation I’ve seen has painted the conspiracies and the people who believe them as outlandish and stupid. This is not how you build trust with anyone, but especially not with rural Appalachians who have been misrepresented by the media for many, many years (think incestuous hillbillies or trashy redneck stereotypes).
And some of this media coverage forgets that many of the most rural places in the Southeast are still without power or cell service since the hurricane (here’s a map of the current outages in North Carolina). People are relying on generators or electricity from libraries or other community centers to charge their essential devices. In an interview with Garden&Gun Magazine, a grid specialist for North Carolina’s Duke Energy described the difficulty getting power to rural places, even on a good weather day.
“Power restoration is challenging on a good day in these remote areas with rough terrain,” Duke Energy employee Jeff Brooks said. “And then you take a hurricane that’s typically on the coast and you put it in the mountains? It’s rebuilding an entire community, not just electric infrastructure – we’re talking roads, we’re talking water, we’re talking everything.”
Misinformation on-the-ground in these rural communities is unavoidable because of these infrastructure challenges. As my colleague Christiana Wayne, who lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, told me, “most rumors have no political valence – they are just the natural response to a completely illogical catastrophe.”
No doubt, the lies circulating about Hurricane Helene are dangerous. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that vice president Kamala Harris spent “all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country.”
This is a lie – on a “rumor response” page published October 3 on FEMA’s website, the agency said Hurricane Helene money from their Disaster Relief Fund “has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.” But the notion has caught on in various far-right corners of the internet, doing nothing but perpetuate Trump’s racist anti-immigration rhetoric and levy attacks against FEMA.
Another potent rumor was Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s post on X that an unidentified “they” had controlled the weather, suggesting Hurricane Helene had been manufactured (this denies any sort of climate change connection). Other conspiracy theories, like that the government is trying to seize land from survivors in North Carolina for lithium mining, have also taken root online thanks to popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
There are countless articles from big newsrooms like CNN, Politico, and NPR that fact-check these theories. But there have been few, if any, articles that recognize their context.
In a country where the Republican vice presidential candidate can say on the debate stage that climate change is “weird science,” nothing less than conspiracy theories around climate change-propelled disasters can be expected. Making fun of the people who believe these theories overlooks the fact that we live in a very divided country where the environment has been politicized and the internet exists as a self-proliferating vacuum where conspiracies build on conspiracies.
Catastrophizing these theories without recognizing the context in which they occur gives them power, which is exactly what’s happening right now with the national media coverage on Hurricane Helene.
And the rumor mill may continue: Hurricane Milton, a Category 4 storm, is on a direct path for Florida, expected to hit land Wednesday, October 9. Conspiracies should be expected to follow, but instead of criticizing them, recognizing the real concern from which they’re born could be one way to take their power away.
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