Before Hurricane Helene, A Perfect Storm Of Climate Denialism

North Carolina was once a leader in climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. But more than a decade of Republican and corporate obstruction left the state woefully unprepared for the arrival of Hurricane Helene last week.

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Rock the boat.

The immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, N.C. (AP Photo / Jeff Roberson)

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In the years before Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina last week, the state’s Republican lawmakers and corporate interests continually fought climate adaptation and mitigation measures that could have helped communities withstand the storm’s tidal surge, hurricane-force winds, and widespread flooding. 

While North Carolina was once a national leader in renewable energy and climate change resiliency policies, that changed in the early 2010s when Republicans secured control of both chambers of the state’s legislature and a former utility company executive moved into the governor’s mansion. Since then, GOP politicians and their big-business allies have sabotaged climate resiliency projects, delayed plans to embrace renewable energy, and stonewalled efforts to prepare the state for stronger storms and a rising sea.

“The Republican approach to climate change has been much like an ostrich with its head in the sand,” said Dan Crawford, director of governmental relations at North Carolina’s League of Conservation Voters, a nonprofit group focused on environmental policy. “And if you’re ignoring all of these things that are happening in the world, it’s going to have effects.”

On Sept. 17, Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 hurricane, wrought havoc throughout the state. On the coast, homes were washed into the ocean ahead of the hurricane making landfall. And in western North Carolina, the storm caused what one county executive called “biblical devastation.” 

Using increasingly precise attribution science, experts are already finding evidence that climate change fueled Helene’s destruction, including that warmer ocean temperatures likely exacerbated the storm’s rain. The most recent national climate assessment, completed last year, found that the amount of precipitation in the most intense rainstorms has increased 37 percent in the Southeast since 1958.

Asheville, a city of nearly 100,000 people tucked into the state’s Smoky Mountains, was hit by historic floods ripping through neighborhoods, destroying the city’s water system, and leaving residents cut off from most outside access due to mudslides and washed-out roads. The death toll has so far reached 57 people in Buncombe County, where Asheville is located. 

Asheville was once billed as a climate haven, given its elevation and distance from the state’s collapsing shoreline — but increasingly intense flooding is making hurricanes more dangerous inland. 

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“I’m actually from that area,” said Crawford. “I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten teary-eyed multiple times seeing the devastation miles from where I grew up. I’m lucky my family survived.” 

But Crawford is clear-eyed that the Republicans’ anti-climate legislation may have made this crisis worse. 

“If you’re stopping progress on the coast,” he said, “then you’re stopping progress in the mountains.”

Now, as North Carolina digs out from Helene, Republicans’ anti-climate efforts in the state could have ripple effects in other communities facing similar disasters in the future. A current employee at the lobbying firm for one of the state’s major power utilities wrote the chapter on energy policy in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint to roll back climate protections and other government safeguards during a second Trump presidency.

North Carolina Goes Off-Track

In the early 2000s, North Carolina, with Democratic control of the governor’s office, was considered an outpost of “Southern progressivism” and was seen by many as leading the charge on climate policy. 

“We used to be a leader in the South on energy issues,” Crawford said.

In 2002, Crawford and his colleagues helped pass the state’s landmark Clean Smokestack Act, which limited emissions from coal plants beyond the pollution standards set by the national Clean Air Act. Then-Attorney General Roy Cooper used the law to help reduce emissions in neighboring states, too.

“We were the first state in the Southeast to have a renewable portfolio,” said Crawford, a mandate that required investor-owned electric utilities to supply 12.5 percent of their electricity retail sales from renewable energy sources by 2021 — a goal the state met. Municipal electric suppliers and rural electric cooperatives achieved similar targets.

In 2006, the state’s General Assembly convened a Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change to study issues related to climate change in the state. In its final report, released in 2010, the Commission asked the state legislature to pass a climate adaptation strategy that would include a statewide climate vulnerability assessment and adaptation plan on matters such as “more frequent and intense hurricanes, flooding, extreme temperature, drought, saltwater intrusion, and beach erosion.” 

That bill was never signed into law. 

“It all took a turn in 2010 when leadership changed and Republicans took over,” Crawford said. 

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That year, Republicans secured majorities in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate — and since then, “it’s been a constant fight” to adopt or preserve climate policies for both mitigation and adaptation efforts that could have helped the state better weather the storms, he added.

In 2010, Republicans slashed the operating budget for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, which upheld environmental protection standards. The department’s bloodletting continued in the years that followed, leading to some of the steepest cuts to a state environmental agency in the country.

Then, in 2011, Republicans proposed a bill that prohibited the communities in the state from using the state’s own updated sea-level-rise risk data in their planning decisions, forcing them to rely on outdated data that showed lower risk. The legislation gained national notoriety, with one pundit declaring the state had just “outlawed climate change.”

When Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina’s coast in 2018, experts claimed communities’ lack of up-to-date flooding plans was one of the reasons the storm caused a record-breaking $17 billion in damage.

Duke Energy In The Governor’s Mansion

In 2012, North Carolina voters replaced Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue with Republican Pat McCrory, a former executive at Duke Energy, the state’s largest public utility, which donated at least $29,000 to McCrory’s election efforts. 

As a result, said Crawford, “It felt like Duke Energy moved into the governor’s mansion.”

McCrory held meetings behind closed doors with the utility and eased safety and remediation rules related to toxic coal ash pollution from Duke Energy’s coal operations. 

In 2014, under McCrory’s tenure, Republican state lawmakers, along with many Democrats, backed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a project helmed by Duke Energy and another major state power utility that would have carried natural gas through some of the state’s poorest eastern communities. Following six years of litigation and escalating costs, the companies abandoned the project in 2020.

The following year, Duke Energy led an ad blitz, largely targeting low-income residents, to fight a bill that would have expanded access to solar power for North Carolina residents by allowing third-party companies to install panels rather than the energy companies themselves. While the legislation had bipartisan support and was supported by large corporations like Walmart and Target, it stalled in committee and never received a vote. 

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The development stalled a decade of solar growth, spurred by the state’s landmark 2007 renewable energy portfolio, which helped North Carolina rank among the top states in the nation for renewable energy capacity.

While McCrory lost reelection in November 2016, Duke Energy has continued to stonewall climate adaptation efforts in the state.

Last year, Duke Energy implemented new bill payment rules that critics say could gut the state’s solar usage by allowing the company to upend a 20-year arrangement and pay residents a lower rate on their solar energy generation. Residents and environmental groups sued Duke to stop the rule change, but last month, a North Carolina Appeals Court sided with the energy company.

“This ruling directly harms our once-growing solar power industry and the communities constantly battered by climate change driven by polluters like Duke Energy,” said Jim Warren, executive director of NC WARN, a climate change awareness group, in a statement.

Sabotaging Climate Progress

While North Carolina Democrats regained the governor’s office in 2016 when Cooper, the Democratic former attorney general, defeated McCrory, Republicans have since used their supermajorities in the legislature to overturn Cooper’s vetoes and push through additional legislation slowing climate mitigation efforts. 

Even after 2020, when the state’s own Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan highlighted the risks posed by climate change, Republican lawmakers have continued to block climate legislation and ease environmental restrictions. 

In 2023, for example, Republican lawmakers in the state overrode a gubernatorial veto and passed legislation barring home sheathing inspections outside of coastal areas that determine whether new homes can withstand hurricane-force winds. By not requiring building codes to be updated, the law also risked jeopardizing the state’s ability to qualify for federal emergency aid in the aftermath of natural disasters, according to a statement released by Cooper’s office.

The North Carolina Home Builders Association, a trade group representing home-building companies, fought hard for the bill, arguing that upgrading housing to withstand hurricane-force winds wasn’t needed outside of coastal areas and would increase home prices.

The builders’ association spent more than $346,000 lobbying state lawmakers in 2023 and has given more than $28,000 in campaign donations to state Rep. Mark Brody (R), the bill’s author, throughout his career. According to emails obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental watchdog group via a records request, the lobbying group also helped write the bill.

“It was kind of a clear example of industry capture, where the legislator who introduced the bill, Rep. Brody, essentially just served as an industry puppet, as a conduit that allowed industry to get its way,” said ​​Itai Vardi, research and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute.

During Hurricane Helene, some of the mountainous areas near Asheville, hundreds of miles from the coast experienced wind gusts potentially up to 80 miles per hour, within the parameters of a Category 1 hurricane. 

In 2023, the North Carolina Home Builders Association also backed Republican lawmakers’ passage of a bill to open 2.5 million acres of the state’s wetlands for development, despite the fact that the state’s own climate resilience plan mandated the government to protect wetlands in the state. 

Scientists say wetlands are essential for absorbing water in storm surges like the one that accompanied Hurricane Helene. Some research suggests that a single acre of wetlands about one foot deep can absorb up to 330,000 gallons of water — enough to flood about 13 homes downstream with several feet of water.

According to Crawford, because of Cooper’s progressive stances on climate, from “executive orders on clean energy mandates” to creating “environmental justice aspects in all departments of state government,” Republican lawmakers have taken aim at his appointments to boards and commissions, including those that set electricity rates and environmental regulations. 

The Republicans’ legislative attempts to stop these appointments are moving through the state’s court system after Cooper’s administration filed a lawsuit challenging the efforts. 

Cooper is reaching the end of his second term this year. Republicans’ choice to replace him, the Trump-endorsed current Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson, has called climate change “junk science.” Following a series of scandals, Robinson is now trailing the state’s current attorney general and Democratic candidate Josh Stein — and is on track for a historic defeat.

Looking Forward (To No Good)

Project 2025 — the sprawling blueprint for a second Trump term crafted by corporate-backed right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation — seeks to increase the country’s use of fossil fuels, roll back environmental protections and weaken disaster-response efforts. 

In the manifesto’s section on energy policy, chapter author Bernard McNamee claims that the “new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme ‘green’ policies.” 

McNamee, a former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, currently works as a senior advisor at lobbying firm McGuireWoods Consulting, which previously advocated on behalf of Dominion Energy, North Carolina’s second-largest energy provider.

“In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a “problem” that government and special interests themselves created,” McNamee wrote.

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Along with aiming to “stop the war on oil and natural gas” and “ending government interference in energy decisions,” Project 2025 calls for the gutting of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal department in charge of preparing for and responding to disasters. In order to “shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government,” the plan aims to slash disaster-preparation grants, privatize the country’s flood insurance and mitigation program and reduce federal aid in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Helene. 

As North Carolina struggles to recover from the storm, questions remain on how the state will confront climate change. And while some Republican lawmakers in the state have recently thrown their support behind renewable energy and climate adaptation, Vardi with the Energy and Policy Institute believes more work needs to be done to ensure the state can withstand future climate disasters.

“Lawmakers are public servants, they are elected by the public to serve the public,” Vardi said. “In this case, the public good is trying to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically so the citizens of North Carolina won't face the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, as we saw them face just a few days ago.”

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