October 10, 2024


Hello, and welcome back to state of emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. There is considerable research on the politics of disaster and how extreme weather shapes voter behavior. We have quoted some of them in this newsletter. Today, you’ll hear about that research through a different lens: from a researcher whose career, and life, was upended by one of the deadliest disasters in American history.

In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich was completing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children and rented a house in New Orleans to start his first ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was bustling in late August as students moved into their dorms and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching. He never reached the campus. Hurricane Katrina struck southeastern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on the morning of August 29, 2005, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths in three southern states and causing $300 billion in damage.

A close-up of the front of an abandoned boarded-up house

The front of Daniel Aldrich’s rented home, located eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Courtesy of Daniel Aldrich

Twelve feet of water turned Aldrich’s home, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp and destroyed everything he owned, including his car. The Aldriches first evacuated to Texas and then moved back to Boston. They didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the horrors on the ground,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his home in the city to Tulane, little fountains of water shot out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwaters crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was almost impossible. Grocery stores were out of stock. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwaters and post-hurricane demolition had swirled the lead in the paint coating many of the city’s nearby homes.

“Hurricane Katrina destroyed my house, my car and everything I owned. For me, it definitely changed my perspective.”

— Disaster researcher Daniel Aldrich

Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disaster and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and become one of America’s leading disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina—which often represent an individual’s first interactions with the federal government—radicalize. That experience, his research found, can ultimately dictate political preferences and voter behavior.

Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically involved after a disaster: They run for office, start community groups and show up at town meetings. Accustomed to sitting outside the research he was doing, Aldrich realized he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my house, my car and everything I owned,” he said. “For me, it definitely changed my perspective.”

Read my full conversation with Aldrich here.


Follow the money

Researchers in Japan analyzed the effects of disaster relief on the electoral outcomes of the established parties. Decades of data have revealed that electoral goods distributed in response to extreme weather events before elections can lead to statistically significant electoral gains for the party in power. We’re talking about a bump of a few percentage points — 2.8 and 5.4 points for Japan’s lower and upper legislative houses, respectively — but in my conversation with Aldrich, he pointed out that because only a third of eligible voters usually voice, a change of 2 to 5 percent is “a pretty big deal.”

A line graph showing the ruling parties' vote share as a function of per capita disaster relief spending in Japan. From 1996–2017, as disaster spending increased, the vote share of the incumbent party increased in kind.

What we read

As PA chooses the next president, its unions choose clean energy: A coalition of unions has formed a new advocacy group, Union Energy, to ensure Pennsylvania’s workers get a “just transition” to a fossil fuel-free economy. My colleague Gautema Mehta reports on trade unions in the state, which is the country’s second largest producer and exporter of fuel for energy.
.Read more

1 in 4 homeowners are financially unprepared for the costs of extreme weather: As major insurance companies withdraw coverage in flood- and fire-prone areas, a survey conducted by Bankrate, a financial services company, finds that 26 percent of homeowners fear they cannot afford the costs of climate-driven disasters. Another 15 percent of the 1,300 homeowners surveyed said they would incur debt that only covers the deductible on their insurance policies.
.Read more

10 tough climate questions for the presidential debate: Journalists at Inside Climate News have 10 climate questions for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who are preparing for their first head-to-head debate in Pennsylvania tonight. Climate change and extreme weather rarely get air time during presidential debates. Inside Climate has the questions climate-conscious voters wish moderators would ask the candidates.
.Read more

Washington state to rethink its landmark climate program: In 2021, Washington lawmakers approved a cap-and-trade program, modeled after California’s carbon market, that aims to cut emissions by 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. In November, voters in the Evergreen State will vote on a measure that would repeal that program. Political reporters interviewed the Democratic state senator who is fighting to keep it alive.
.Read more

Extreme heat strains the power grid and causes outages across LA County: Triple digit temperatures in California are setting records and leading to grid failures throughout Los Angeles County and other parts of the state. Thousands of customers in Los Angeles and in the neighborhoods around the University of Southern California lost power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, several school districts canceled classes and reassessed the effectiveness of their cooling systems due to high temperatures.
.Read more






Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *