Analysts estimate the category 3 storm has already racked up a preliminary cost of $9.36bn, straining the insurance industry
Hurricane Idalia could become the costliest climate disaster to hit the US this year, analysts say, with massive implications for insurance and risk management industries.
The category 3 storm that barreled into Florida’s west coast from the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, then carved a path of destruction and flooding through Georgia and the Carolinas, has a preliminary price tag of $9.36bn, based on early estimates, according to risk analysts at UBS.
It follows 15 previous “individual weather and climate disasters” recorded in the US already this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) as unprecedented heat, wildfires, storms and floods escalate.
In effect, he has become the chief annihilator of democracy.
Anti-Donald Trump protesters hold letters that spell out ‘justice’ in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3 as former president Donald Trump was set to appear in federal court on charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (AP Photo/Jess Rapfogel)
“He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up.”
Put differently, Trump has criminalized both social problems and politics itself.
Trump and his allies have long created a culture of lies, illusions, cruelty and misrepresentation. He has waged an incessant attack on reason, critical thinking, informed judgment and social responsibility. His distaste for Black people, migrants and others he considers disposable is matched by his support for the financial and corporate elite.
Yet, despite the damage Trump has done to democracy, he has almost complete support of the Republican Party and a majority of Republican voters — slightly more than 58 per cent say they still plan to vote for him in the 2024 presidential election if he wins the Republican nomination. He appears poised to clinch that nomination.
Even more troubling are recent polls indicating he’s in a dead heat with U.S. President Joe Biden if they’re the presidential nominees in 2024.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden participate in a presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., in October 2020. (Jim Bourg/Pool via AP)
What explains Trump’s appeal?
Most of media is focused on Trump’s legal troubles. But too little has been written about the conditions that have given rise to his authoritarian politics or why Trump is a national disgrace still backed by millions of Americans.
Trump’s grip on power is a collective nightmare that can only be understood in terms of the historical, economic, political and cultural conditions of which he is the endpoint.
“Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent.”
Trump embodies a society that has been in crisis for decades, but especially since the 1980s. This was a period when the right-wing counter-revolution emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan gives a thumbs up to the crowd while his wife, first lady Nancy Reagan, waves from a limousine during the inaugural parade in Washington following Reagan’s swearing in as the 40th president of the United States in January 1981. (AP Photo/File)
Since that time, the democratic values that informed the social contract and common good have been increasingly displaced by market values that stress self-interest, privatization, commodification, deregulation and the accumulation of profit and celebration of greed. Civic culture came under attack along with the erosion of the values of shared citizenship.
The market became a template for controlling not just the economy, but all of society. The language of rabid individualism replaced the notion of the common good and gave way to a disdain for community.
Government was discredited as a force for good, its public infrastructure was eroded and replaced by a culture of cruelty in which matters of compassion, care, and ethical responsibility began to disappear.
What emerged was society marked by precarity, loneliness and mass anxiety. The rising cult of individualism made it difficult for the public to translate private troubles into systemic considerations, weakening the public imagination. The rise of a media environment where politics becomes a form of entertainment helped silence any resistance to a growing culture of lies and greed.
Staggering levels of economic inequality also emerged, setting the ground for dark money shaping politics. This neoliberal poison helped to create a society of political monsters, immune to the virtues and conditions of democracy.
A homeless man resting on a steam vent on the National Mall in 2019 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Harnessed to exclusion and bigotry, the language of freedom was invoked eventually by Trump and other Republican Party politicians to produce policies that have banned books, crushed dissent, limited classroom and workplace discussions about race, whitewashed African American history and justified a virulent anti-democratic politics that echo the ghosts of a fascist past.
America at a crossroads
The most important issues Americans face today are not solely about Trump’s corruption, lawlessness or open authoritarianism — it’s about learning from history.
We must rethink the lies that neoliberal capitalism have told us about how American society defines itself while rethinking what it will take to challenge and overcome the anti-democratic forces that gave rise to Trump.
The 2024 election should be about more than Trump’s ongoing legal travails. It should be a directive for what kind of society Americans want and what kind of future they desire for their children. They should regard the election as a choice between democracy and the further criminalization of American politics.
Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
Despite floods and fires, both left and right in the US act like environmental disaster isn’t happening
There’s a lot of hot air from the American right around education at the moment, with hate groups inciting moral panics that have resulted in the banning of books related to race, sex and gender. But there seems to be surprisingly little emphasis on another right-wing bugbear: environmentalism.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that US conservatives don’t consider bashing Greta Thunberg on the internet a national pastime. It’s just that Greta and the cause she represents don’t seem to come up when right-wing activists go to school-board meetings to scream about ‘transgenderism’ or ‘critical race theory’.
On one level, it is, of course, good that they’re not calling for literature addressing our environmental crises to be banned in schools. Growing up, I learned a lot from Ranger Rick magazine, a product of the National Wildlife Federation that teaches children about nature and supports conservation. But on another level, the lack of interest on this issue from the right may actually signal a problem for the US and therefore – because my country is such an outsized contributor to global climate change – the entire planet.
Authoritarians are bullies who paint themselves as victims. If you want to see what I mean, just type ‘Donald Trump’ and the phrase ‘treated very unfairly’ into Google. They whine and scream the loudest when they feel their privilege and power to be most immediately threatened. And if Republicans do not feel especially threatened on behalf of their precious fossil fuels industry, that’s probably because the US is highly unlikely to pass any serious environmental regulations any time soon.
“If the disasters we’re seeing this month aren’t enough to shake us out of that torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and twenty-five thousand years seem remote.”
Southern Europe faced dangerously high temperatures on Sunday amid a continent-wide heatwave that’s expected to get worse in the coming days, potentially shattering longstanding records as the climate crisis rages.
Reuters reported that a “new anticyclone dubbed Charon, who in Greek mythology was the ferryman of the dead, pushed into the region from north Africa on Sunday and could lift temperatures above 45°C (113°F) in parts of Italy early this week,” prompting Italian officials to issue heat advisories for more than a dozen cities on Sunday.
Meteo.it, Italy’s weather news service, said Sunday that the country must “prepare for a severe heat storm that, day after day, will blanket the whole country.”
“In some places,” the service added, “ancient heat records will be broken.”
The fastest-warming continent on the planet, Europe has been facing scorching heat over the past several weeks as scientists warn that the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis is making such heatwaves more likely and increasingly intense. Last summer was Europe’s hottest season on record, and extreme heat killed more than 61,000 people on the continent between late May to early September of 2022.
But the current heatwave appears on track to be even more severe than last summer’s.
As CNN reported Sunday, “Climate scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) say temperatures could reach 48°C (118.4°F) on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, ‘potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.'”
“The ESA warned that Europe’s heat wave has only just begun with Spain, France, Germany, and Poland expected to see extreme weather, just as the continent welcomes what is expected to be a record-breaking number of tourists coming for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic,” the outlet added.
Giulio Betti, an Italian meteorologist and climate expert, told the BBC that “temperatures will reach a peak between 19 and 23 July—not only in Italy but also in Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans.”
“Several local heat records within these areas may well be broken during those days,” Betti added.
Saturday was another sweltering day across southern Europe. The intense heat stretched into Germany, although the highest temperature was again in Turkey at 44C, the July average being 32C. pic.twitter.com/BX62yNFHxW
Large swaths of the U.S., Asia, and Africa have experienced sweltering temperatures and other extreme weather—including deadly flooding—in recent weeks, heightening the urgency of coordinated climate action at the upcoming COP28 conference in the United Arab Emirates.
“It was probably the Earth’s hottest week in history earlier this month, following the warmest June on record, and top scientists agree that the planet will get even hotter unless we phase out fossil fuels,” The Guardian‘s Dharna Noor wrote Sunday. “Yet leading energy companies are intent on pushing the world in the opposite direction, expanding fossil fuel production and insisting that there is no alternative. It is evidence that they are motivated not by record warming, but by record profits, experts say.”
In February, after reporting a record-shattering $28 billion in 2022 profits, the London-based oil giant BP announced that it was walking back its emission-reduction goals and planning to produce more fossil fuels than expected.
Shell, which posted $40 billion in profits last year, followed suit last month, ditching its plans to reduce oil production by up to 2% per year.
In a New Yorkercolumn on Sunday, author and climate advocate Bill McKibben noted that the BBC aired an interview with Shell CEO Wael Sawan on July 6, the day scientists believe may have been the hottest on record.
During the interview, Sawan claimed that cutting oil and gas production would be “dangerous and irresponsible,” drawing swift backlash.
McKibben noted that Sawan “told the BBC that, while there are not currently any plans, Shell wouldn’t rule out moving its headquarters from the United Kingdom to the United States, where oil companies get higher market prices for their shares.”
“This suggested to him that the U.S. is more supportive of oil and gas companies, and, as he has told investors, he wants to ‘reward our shareholders today and far into the future,'” McKibben added. “That is pretty much the definition of ‘business as usual,’ and it’s precisely what has generated this completely unprecedented heat. If the disasters we’re seeing this month aren’t enough to shake us out of that torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and twenty-five thousand years seem remote.”
JEREMY CORBYN led calls today [Wednesday] for the immediate release of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on World Press Freedom Day.
The former Labour leader highlighted how Mr Assange has spent four years in maximum security prison Belmarsh for exposing the truth.
He said: “We cannot stand by and let governments silence those who seek to expose the truth.
“Today, let’s defend free and democratic journalism everywhere.”
In 2010, Mr Assange published US government records on WikiLeaks that revealed its military committed war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the killing of two Reuters journalists.
