The recurring disasters of hurricanes in the US highlight the disastrous internal politics of a militaristic empire in denial, argues Kevin Crane

The south-eastern United States has been plunged into something like a nightmare from which no one can wake up. On 27 September, Hurricane Helene struck the Florida peninsula from the Mexican Gulf eastbound, becoming the most devastating storm to ravage the American mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Helene is not even the first major cyclone of the 2024 storm season, and it’s not even the last or potential worst. At time of writing, Hurricane Milton, already breaking records as one of the most rapidly intensifying storms in history, is bound for the same region.

The human, social and economic impact of Helene so far is already utterly immense. Deaths and injuries are not fully known, but well over 200 people have been confirmed to have died. The cost of damage is also not fully calculated but may be in excess of $30 billion according to Moody’s financial services. Of course, behind these numbers is just the terrible, terrible stories of ordinary people experiencing horror that nobody should ever have to face. It ranges from people drowning in their own flooded homes, to rows of building collapsing and then bursting into flames because the energy supplies have been damaged.

Entire small towns in some areas have been absolutely destroyed and their populations returning from evacuation to find little other than rubble and filthy water where homes and workplaces used to be. This would be a tragedy under any circumstances, but in the year 2024, it is made an order of magnitude worse because there is no time to recover. Milton is bearing down on the region, and it has such destructive force that it will turn all that rubble into flying shrapnel. The call has had to be put out to evacuate again, it has been directed to one-million Americans. A mayor of one major town took to television to tell her citizens that if they tried to stay put during this second storm, she believed they would simply die. A meteorologist tried to convey the sheer scale of Milton in another broadcast, but found himself bursting into tears as the reality of what he was saying overcame him. The future viability of living in large parts of Florida has been called into question. You’d possibly find all this a bit ridiculous in a film, but it’s completely real.

Alas, not everybody acts like it is. Even when they claim to be.

Failures of Politics

The way American political discourse has responded to the situation has been a sorry display of the irrationality that is now common within it. Quite rightly, a lot of people both in the USA and round the world have poured scorn on the way the American far right has completely disrupted responses to the catastrophe by flooding social media, and conventional media, with belief-beggaring rhetoric. Of particular note was the infamous congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, who put on her social media: ‘Climate change is the new Covid. Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give them permission to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.’

Greene is essentially a fascist politician who owes her career to the ‘QAnon’ movement, a mass political cult that supports Donald Trump, not out of any particular policy position, but on the grounds that he is engaged in a secret war against paedophiles who perform witchcraft. It’s not surprising that she can shift from one set of absurd beliefs to any other. It’s probably not even right to call this behaviour lying, since she and the sort of people who promote her both in office and online, probably experience this stuff as hallucinations that they genuinely believe. Either way, this is only an extreme expression of sentiments that are widely distributed in US public discussion.

While Trump himself, and even the reactionary governor of the state of Florida Ron DeSantis, stop short of quite believing that Joe Biden’s government has some magical ability to create hurricanes, they do promote other nonsense, some of which is very damaging. The US far right has spread myths that emergency workers are using the storms as a conspiracy to displace white people from their homes so that non-white immigrants can be given them, or that federal aid money is being diverted from US citizens to be given to migrants. Even without going into how racist this is, it is positively dangerous to create such distrust and paranoia when there is an urgent and very complicated operation taking place to evacuate the vulnerable, rescue survivors and restore the damage.

Whenever we talk about the craziness of the US far right, however, we do need to keep in mind that it does not have popular appeal for no reason. The presidential election is happening in just a few weeks, but until this point, the government of outgoing president Joe Biden has been markedly slow to raise its game on disaster relief. Absurdly, the issue has been so far down the political agenda that when the two candidates for vice president met for a debate in the days after Hurricane Helene happened, the two men had more to say about who was most committed to supporting Israel than what they thought could be done to help disaster victims in Florida.

Indeed, it is actually true that US taxpayers’ money has been diverted, in the billions, away from infrastructural requirements that could be helping with this emergency. Unlike what the far right say, however, it hasn’t gone to immigrants, it has gone to fund the militaries of Israel and Ukraine. Because even if politicians of the US Democratic Party claim to be the serious, sensible ‘progressive’ choice, the reality of what they value has always got more to do with war and militarism than anything regarding people and the environment.

Policy doom loops

There’s no scientific debate – in the real world – about why this hurricane season is so terrible. It’s all to do with runaway high seawater temperatures, which were always predicted to be a result of climate change but have significantly exceeded official expectations. Hurricanes occur when opposing flows of hot and cold water and air collide in the Atlantic Ocean, and they’ve always been occurring. With the massive temperature differentials that are caused by such extremely high sea temperatures near the equator today, they were only ever going to have more energy and therefore be more destructive. We were all absolutely warned.

The problem is that the Western establishment, even though its political mainstream ostensibly heeded those warnings, did not act on them accordingly. This is true throughout the West, but it’s particularly true of the USA, and it continues to be. America’s efforts at reducing carbon dioxide and other climate-change-inducing emissions are going completely the wrong way.

The most obvious issue is America’s current war agenda. The Ukraine war has been an ecological disaster, even before you factor in the US/Ukrainian destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline. America, with its Nato allies, has placed the fantasy of military victory against Russia much higher on the list of priorities than limiting ecological damage, so they must keep arming Ukraine to prolong the war.

Then, of course, there’s Israel. The genocide and spreading of war in the Middle East are well-documented human and environmental catastrophes, but the USA’s military-led foreign policy places imperial geostrategy ahead of those things, so the armaments and troops must be sent to keep the horror going.

Exorbitant spending on its military harms the American state’s capacity to do more positive things inside its own borders, but even factoring that in, American domestic policy is worse than bad regarding the environment. Ostensibly, the Biden administration knows it is meant to decarbonise, but it isn’t, because while its foreign policy is dictated by the military-industrial complex, its domestic policy is dictated by an energy-technology complex.

The tech sector, despite abundant evidence that its business models and new products are failing, continues to exert huge policy pressure on a government and political establishment in which they are deeply embedded. A crazy situation exists in which companies like Microsoft and Google can somehow still obtain funding to build bigger and bigger datacentres to support ever more complex artificial intelligence products. This is despite those products making no money in revenue. More importantly for this discussion, such vast facilities will consume huge quantities of electricity that America does not currently have the capacity to generate. The fossil-fuel companies are loving it: they have been gleefully expanding gas-power electricity plants throughout the country, and no one proposes to stop them.

America is increasing its usage of fossil fuels, both as a proportion of energy generated and as an absolute quantity, as the world urgently needs carbon consumption to be reduced. It’s crazy, and it entirely destroys the credibility of a government that pays lip service to wanting to protect the environment. Since both the governing Democratic, and opposition Republican, political parties are keen to retain good relations with the interests that sustain all this, it would be unwise to expect much to change after the election in November.

Climate of Decline

Since the 2010s, left-led discussions about climate change have often emphasised that the harm it does is falling disproportionately on the people of the Global South and that this is obviously unjust since the quantity of energy that they ever got to use is so much less. This way of looking at things is not untrue, but it could lead you to a belief that is untrue: that people in the Global North are in some way safe from ecological crisis. We can see from the news reports that that’s far from the case, and even that some areas of ‘developed’ countries are being reduced to a virtually unliveable status.

Americans widely distrust political elites with good cause: they are constantly lied to and let down by them. The Democratic Party, and its centrist admirers around the world, love to point and laugh at stupid Republican voters backing Trump. What they do not understand, because they do not want to understand, is that Trump gets that support because he is successfully channelling very real fear and anxiety from a large mass of the population into a political project for his own power. They do not want to understand it, because that would mean acknowledging realities about America’s declining place in the world, which in turn means acknowledging the failures of its capitalist and imperialist nature.

Having pledged almost unlimited quantities of money to Ukrainian and Israeli vassals for wars that show no sign of ending, the US government is going to have to dig deep to do some sort of rebuild in the southeast once the storm season does finally end. This is likely to be covered by simply printing billions more dollars, something that the USA has historically been uniquely privileged to do without instantly triggering inflation due to its position as a world empire. That privilege does not look set to last much longer; not only are its military adventures going wrong on all levels, but it has responded to various political and diplomatic setbacks by sanctioning increasing numbers of countries. The more that they effectively prevent more of the world from access to their dollar, the less and less this is a problem to those countries and the more it starts to become a problem for America itself.

While it increasingly fails to project itself overseas, the USA’s internal failures are far too clear to deny. It cannot guarantee a good life for its citizens, and it can’t protect them from crises. Its internal economy is dominated by a series of huge investment bubbles that have all the ecological hazards and social drawbacks of the industry but aren’t producing anything of redeeming value. Its political class not only have no meaningful solutions to any of these problems, but the false solutions they pose are contributing to making everything worse in a variety of interlocking ways.

Even a thriving world power would have struggled with the impact of the 2024 hurricane season. A morbidly declining power may well have been hastened on its way to collapse.