As we continue to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, we speak with Manuel Ivan Guerrero, a freshman at the University of Central Florida and an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, who says young people are extremely worried about the impact of the climate crisis on their communities. “This just has me more scared for what the future’s going to look like in Florida,” he says. “We’re having these thousand-year storms every three, four years now.” We also speak with David Wallace-Wells, a writer for The New York Times opinion section and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, where he frequently writes about climate. He says the popularity of conspiracy theories during extreme weather events shows that many people are retreating “into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia, and that scares me in some ways even more than the weather itself.”

AMY GOODMAN: Hurricane Milton comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene battered Florida and other southeastern states, killing at least 230 people. A new analysis by the group World Weather Attribution finds the burning of fossil fuels has made highly destructive storms like Helene more than twice as likely. Florida climate activists have declared Republican Governor Ron DeSantis unfit to lead the state since his policies promote fossil fuels, reject sustainable energy options and ignore or deny the climate crisis.

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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah, I think the story is much bigger than Ron DeSantis. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, Donald Trump campaigning in part on Project ’25’s promises to defund FEMA and cut emergency services and disaster response. We are seeing all of this disinformation surrounding Hurricane Helene with people posting on social media about FEMA helicopters shooting down disaster relief, people circulating conspiracy theories about land being seized by the federal government, not to mention, as you highlighted earlier, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the weather itself is man-made and controlled by the government. There’s a kind of grim irony in those who deny that human activity can be driving the climate crisis but who believe that government actors can control the weather to this scale.

  • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 month ago

    Why do they hate FEMA so much? What do they do that is supposedly so evil? Or more to the point, what do they have to gain by getting rid of them.

    • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 month ago

      Well the second question’s easy. The goal always seems to be to cut all forms of federal spending

      Now, the regular poor people that believe and support this stuff, no idea

    • Ooops
      4·
      1 month ago

      They don’t hate them. They just want to cut all support for citizens to have more money available to finance more tax cuts for rich people.

      But to do this you need to somehow convince the masses that money spend on them is a bad thing. For decades trickle-down fairy tales of how spending money on the already rich ones will help the economy and then be beneficial for all worked. But not anymore. So the next phase in desinforming gullible voters is much more dystopian and involves straight out brain-washing to decouple them from reality and make them believe that people actually helping them are evil and need to be fought.