The October Surprise

Mother Nature has abruptly slammed upon our shores with an unmatched force and fury as our endless election season mercifully winds down toward its finishing kick, and if you don’t think she’s serious about exposing the Republicans’ reprehensible response to the catastrophic impacts of global warming, I suggest you contact the victims of Hurricane Helene and the looming Milton for a reference.

Because of course it was going to be a woman who put the hammer down and made Americans painfully aware yet again of the very real consequences of our rapidly changing climate, and which political party is interesting in doing something about it, and which one incredibly wants to make its crushing impacts even worse.

If in the choppy wake of these one-after-another terrible storms Democrats are understandably reticent to make this a full-blown campaign issue for fear of sending an insensitive message to the victims of these storms, who are currently hip-deep in mud, misery, and mourning, I sure the hell won’t be.

There is no issue that illustrates the extreme differences between the two governing parties in America more than this one, and depending on which of these parties prevails at the ballot box in fours weeks, will generate a forecast of much-needed hope or extreme worry going forward.

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Our media is doing their level best to once again fail the American public by informing them of the glaring difference between the two parties in attacking global warming, but more on that one with a gust in a minute ...

We are in this terrible place precisely because Republicans have done everything in their power to ignore it. Their relentless attacks on the science, facts and inconvertible evidence of the dangers we are facing because of our changing climate have been appalling at best, and incredibly dangerous at worst.

That’s about as lightly as I can put it.

To be sky-blue clear here: Kamala Harris understands the significance of this issue, and the need to act with alacrity, and Donald Trump does not. Or as his third wife, Melania, would say, “I really don’t care, do you?”

Led by former-Vice President Al Gore, Harris and the Democrats have been warning of the dire impacts of global warming for three decades now, while Republicans like Trump have dutifully ignored it at behest of their reprehensible bosses in the fossil fuel industry, who have never seen a pristine ecosystem they won’t dig into and destroy with glee.

Their massive failures to take this problem seriously have turned what has been a horrible problem into a full-blown crisis effecting millions.

Interestingly, and perhaps even more perplexing, there is a decent and increasing slice of Republicans who don’t agree with their party’s brutally stupid and wobbly stance on this critical issue.

According to a landmark study on climate change by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications late last year, 72 percent of Americans “believe global warming is happening” and only 15 percent don’t. Of the nearly three-quarters of Americans who believe our planet is warming, 58 percent believe that humans are behind it, while only 29 percent of Americans don’t.

So twice as many Americans think we are to blame for the demise of our planet than don’t. That is a significant finding.

From the report:

• Majorities of Americans are worried their local area might be harmed by electricity power outages (74%), air pollution (73%), extreme heat (70%), water pollution (67%), droughts (63%), agricultural pests and diseases (63%), flooding (58%), water shortages (56%), tornados (56%), and wildfires (52%). Many Americans are also worried their local area might be harmed by hurricanes (39%), rising sea levels (38%), and reduced snow pack (37%).

If politics are local then this issue resonates throughout an ample cross-section of America, which cuts across any red- or blue-state boundaries. These stunning numbers have been steadily on the rise, and are getting to the point where only the willingly ignorant and/or those who stuff their pockets with cash from the sludge they pull out of the ground are willingly blind to what is happening right in front of their eyes.

Their continued ignorance around the most important issue of our times has been abhorrent, wildly irresponsible, resulted in the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and if not dealt with in a responsible bipartisan fashion pronto, will be the thing that ultimately finishes us off.

We are now at the point where our active-duty military are being deployed to help the people on the ground who are fighting and losing this war against an undefeated foe.

The good people in western North Carolina who never dreamed they could see their family members and homes vanish due to the impacts of hurricanes are enduring unbelievable hardships right now. Florida, and the moron who inhabits its statehouse, are once again staring down a hurricane packing a storm surge that will swallow an entire one-story house whole.

This is simply not sustainable. Just ask the reprehensible insurance industry in the state, which has made it almost impossible for Floridians to protect their homes. They know the storms are only getting started, and have no answers but to jack up prices so high only the wealthy can afford them …

So what is the Republican plan to help combat the defining issue of our times?

Well, it’s to do everything they can to continue to make it even worse.

In Project 2025, their only known platform heading into this election besides eliminating the fictional illegal immigrants who are eating our suburban pets, there is an entire chapter devoted to their insane plans to throw gasoline on our overheated planet. Here are just some of the gory highlights:

— Withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and all other formal engagement and collaboration with other countries on the issue.
—Replace civil servants and renowned experts on the subject within our government with rightwing political hacks.
—“Unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants.
— Eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) and replacing them with private companies, which will do their bidding not ours.
— Moving the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), which handles federal disaster response, from the Department of Homeland Security, to the either the Department of the Interior or the Department of Transportation, which is just insane.
—Multiple rollbacks of policies that have been in place for decades protectingAmericans’ access to clean air, clean drinking water, and protected public lands.

As Kamala Harris said in her very first speech on the campaign trail in Wisconsin I attended back in July, “Can you believe they put all this in writing?”

Worse, no less than six Republican congresspeople from Florida have voted to cut FEMA. You are reading that one correctly.

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to reconvene Congress to discuss addressing potential funding shortfalls in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

I mean, what kind of ghoul does that?

Instead of taking the repeated warnings seriously, these complete idiots are literally spitting into the 160 mph winds of a hurricane.

And what of our media, which I mentioned above? Why, when it is so damn obvious which party is taking this extreme threat seriously and which one isn’t, aren’t they treating it with the importance it demands?

Americans need to know where the two parties stand. They need to know the Republicans intend to somehow make this tragic situation even worse.

This is the bare minimum our working press should be providing their audiences right now, and they are once again catastrophically failing us.

As I put this piece to bed, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on the Sunshine State packing sustained winds of 150 mph, and sure as I am typing this will flatten a large part of the west coast of Florida in the coming days. Hundreds of thousands of Floridians and people in the adjacent states will have their lives radically changed forever.

Some will die.

With women’s rights hanging in the balance this November, Mother Nature is on the scene right now doing everything she can to shake some damn sense into all of us. She is literally showing us that if Trump and his vile Republicans win in November, we might not survive it.

Just how in the hell is this still a surprise?

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.