How Hurricane Milton has exposed left-wing inaction and right-wing denial of climate change
October 2024; and as Hurricane Milton barrels eastwards across the Gulf of Mexico and slams into the west coast of Florida, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – well known as the “queen” of her party’s radical right-wing fringe – makes history by saying something on social media that is undeniably true. “Yes they can change the weather,” argued Greene, referring to her fellow humans, “and it’s ridiculous to lie, and say it can’t be done”.
Now this is a notable change of tack, from the Greene tendency; until now, they have stuck to the Donald Trump line that the idea of human-made climate change is a “hoax”. With the unerring instinct of a fully paid-up right-wing conspiracy theorist, though, Greene then points the finger in exactly the wrong direction; not towards the fossil fuel industries whose massive promotion of oil, gas and coal burning over the last century has, in fact, caused the temperature rise now destabilising our weather, but towards the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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Hide AdThe NOAA, she suggests, is part of a deep-state conspiracy to create hurricanes, and direct them towards Republican-voting areas, presumably in order to strengthen the case for policies to reduce carbon emissions – policies naturally reviled and detested by the Trump/Maga movement.
Cowardly and contemptible
Now of course, Greene’s views, and those of Trump himself, have been slammed and ridiculed, not only by President Joe Biden, but by many in her own party.
Yet the whole sorry episode only serves to demonstrate the abject failure of politicians across the developed world to get to grips with a crisis on a scale unprecedented in human history. That the denialist response of the Trump-Greene’s far-right is cowardly and contemptible goes without saying; if humanity is facing a potentially terminal threat, the least we can do is square our shoulders and speak the truth about it; and it is truly terrifying, given recent events, that Trump still stands a good chance of being returned to the White House in November.


What is possibly even more frightening, though, is the apparent paralysis, in the face of this crisis, even of politicians who seem fully to recognise its gravity. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the United States under Biden, and the EU as a whole, have achieved any significant carbon reductions; and these are often bitterly contested, or condemned as useless forms of gesture politics given the scale of the problem.
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Witness the reaction to last week’s switching off of the UK’s final coal-burning power station; a move greeted across most British media with a mixture of nostalgic regret, dismissive contempt, and nationalistic tub-thumping about how abandoning fossil fuels weakens the country. That pull-up-the-drawbridge nationalism, as a knee-jerk response to mounting global crises, only weakens our capacity for international co-operation on climate change at precisely the moment when we need it most; and when its absence absolutely guarantees that no country acting alone – except possibly China – will do anything much at all.
In the end, though, the problem that paralyses even our best-intentioned politicians is the domestic political one; the fact that as long as some kind of normality persists, in Western day-to-day-life, there is only very limited popular support for the kind of radical change that is now needed. It’s not that voters don’t care about the looming climate crisis; they do, and many are deeply concerned.
Yet the very pressures created by growing climate and supply-chain stress, including rising prices, make voters increasingly wary of any change that might put their increasingly precarious household budgets under stress; and that fear fuels a backlash whenever an elected government tries to make even minor changes to our our car-dependent, carbon-burning economy.
“Yes we need to do something, but not that,” cry voters, eagerly backed by the fossil fuel lobby, which can always think of a reason to keep on pumping and burning oil; and so we continue on the high road to climate breakdown, as governments make brave climate commitments and then back down on them, or fail to implement them effectively.
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Hide AdCentre-left paralysis
Both the Scottish Government of the last 17 years and Keir Starmer’s new UK Government are classic examples of this centre-left paralysis, caught like rabbits in the twin headlights of environmental crisis on one hand, and powerful lobbies for the status quo on the other; and those politicians who say that they understand the threat of climate change, and yet fail to act decisively, are in some ways even more dangerous to our future than the ranting denialists of the far-right.
Yet when politicians acknowledge that something must be done, that at least creates a potential for dialogue with environmental groups about possible effective action; and there are times and places – in Biden’s USA, in various European countries wealthy enough to invest in alternatives, and in some imaginative developing countries like Costa Rica, which is dedicated to preservation and restoration of its rainforests – where elements of effective climate action can happen, and continue to happen.
Divisive politics of social media age
All of these small gains, though, are vulnerable to forces of political backlash encouraged by massive vested interests in the existing global economy, and to the deep and disempowering political divisions – the fatal absence of consensus – that characterises politics in the social media age.
Stronger political leadership on this issue would be welcome, of course. In order to act, though, our politicians may finally need to be shaken from their paralysis by a storm-surge of united public opinion demanding a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren, and declaring our willingness to accept the sometimes disruptive changes that will entail. And until our political leaders hear the people singing that song, loudly and in harmony, even the best of them are likely to hesitate, and to find themselves fiddling at the margins, while our beloved world floods, and burns.
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