The October Surprise of 2024 is named Milton | Will Bunch Newsletter

Plus, a new poll shows fracking is still not very popular in Pennsylvania.

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published Oct. 8, 2024, 10:54 a.m. ET

Exactly 51 years ago today — Oct. 8, 1973 — I went to my first baseball playoff game, Game 3 of the National League Championship Series between the Mets and Reds at Shea Stadium. I was 14, and after I heard the night before that the game wasn’t sold out despite the Columbus Day holiday, I hopped on a train and the No. 7 subway, walked up to the ticket booth and nabbed a seat in the last rows of the left field upper deck. I saw an epic game with a legendary brawl between the Reds’ Pete Rose and the Mets’ Bud Harrelson. Never could I have imagined a 2024 October when I’d return to the playoffs, this time with my son and his girlfriend, climb up to the same nosebleed left-field upper deck view but in a completely different city — now rooting AGAINST the Mets. Life throws so many curveballs. Like Nick Castellanos, swing at every one.

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Climate change comes for Tampa, and for all of us. Vote accordingly in November.

In Florida, it sure seems like there are a lot of words that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his GOP allies don’t want you to say. Like “gay,” for example. Or “climate change.”

It was less than four months ago that DeSantis signed a new law striking any language around climate change from official state documents — in line with a broader scheme to abandon its former policy to curb fossil-fuel burning, and to instead build more natural-gas infrastructure. In striking mentions of climate change from state policy, Florida’s new language says its new goal is to promote “a diverse supply of domestic energy resources.”

OK, well in that case I hope DeSantis and his Republican pals fully grasp that a killer hurricane made much, much worse by “a diverse supply of domestic energy resources” is rapidly bearing down on 3 million residents of the state’s second largest metropolis, the Tampa Bay area.

Hurricane Milton, which went from a blob of tropical rain to a Category 5 monster in little more than a day, is about to become the October Surprise of the 2024 election — or more accurately, the second one. Coupled with the recent Hurricane Helene and its path of devastation that sent once-in-a-millennium floodwaters barreling down the hillsides of Appalachia, these storms made so much more intense by climate change (we can say that here in Pennsylvania) are not just upending lives and livelihoods but threatening to turn the four-week-away election on its head.

Today and tomorrow, the focus won’t be on politics — not for residents of the heavily populated Gulf Coast who are already stuck in traffic jams heading north on I-75, forming gas lines like an Arab oil embargo, and buying up all the plywood at Home Depot. By Monday night, Milton was already ranked as one of the five most powerful Atlantic hurricanes ever, with a fury that caused even South Florida’s most experienced weatherman to break down in tears on live TV.

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” NBC6′s John Morales reported, choking up. He added: “It is just gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico, where, as you can imagine, the seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot — a record hot, as you might imagine. I don’t need to tell you what’s driving that — global warming, climate change, leading to this.”

Andra Garner, an assistant professor of environmental sciences at South Jersey’s Rowan University who’s a top researcher of Atlantic hurricanes, told me on Monday that, since the 1970s and ‘80s, such storms are now three times more likely to intensify from Category 1 into a major hurricane — as happened with Helene and now Milton. And it’s little secret why.

What the storms, Garner said, “both have in common, and that many recent storms that have intensified really quickly also have in common, is that they have an ample fuel supply from warm ocean waters.” She noted about 90% of the excess heat from global warming is absorbed by oceans. “And so as we warm the planet, we really are kind of ‘stacking the deck’ against ourselves, making these kinds of extremes more likely.”

That could be especially disastrous for Tampa, which is reeling from the record storm surge the metro area experienced during Helene, even though that storm made landfall hundreds of miles to the northwest. The devastation in Greater Tampa, including 12 deaths, wasn’t the only surprise from a storm whose flooding carried far inland to communities like Asheville, N.C. — long touted as a mountain “climate haven.” The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said that climate change made the flooding in Appalachia 20 times more likely.

“Prediction: after Helene and Milton, this is going to be in no small part a climate election,” the top environmental activist Bill McKibben, who launched the successful fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, posted Monday on X/Twitter. I’m not as sure about that, but the hurricanes have truly spotlighted the major differences between Republicans and Democrats.

The climate denial of Donald Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance is reflected in Project 2025 — the blueprint for a second Trump term, drafted by some of his closest aides — which would gut the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and name pro-Trump MAGA zealots to run it. Project 2025 would close offices seeking renewable energy and environmental justice, finance oil and gas pipelines instead of an expanded grid for clean energy, break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and also slash money for key agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This was before Trump promised Big Oil billionaires that he’d eliminate climate regulations if they raised $1 billion to fund his campaign.

Disappointingly, Vice President Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats haven’t played up the $369 billion for clean energy and related projects in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Or, the simple fact they believe that climate change is real. Instead, Trump’s climate-denial extremism has given Harris running room on her right flank, as she plays up her recent support for fracking. But the difference between the two tickets is still massive.

It’s revealing, then, that Trump. Vance and other Republicans seem to think Helene’s destruction — a path that included two swing states in Georgia and North Carolina — is enough of a political threat that they came up with a uniquely right-wing response: conspiracy theories. Trump’s new Big Lies that the Biden-Harris administration isn’t responding to Helene (GOP Southern governors admit that’s not so) or that FEMA is broke because the money was spent on undocumented immigrants (simply not true) are a twofer for the aspiring autocrat: Whip up the mob against “Other-ized” migrants while deflecting the blame from his Big Oil donors. It’s repulsive, but what would you expect from a party whose Florida leader just threw climate change down the memory hole.

The idea of an October Surprise — some cataclysmic event that will roil the November election — has always loomed more as a threat than reality. The chaos from these two hurricanes could be the exception. The irony is that if America has listened to decades of warnings from our scientists, Hurricane Milton would not have been a surprise at all.

Yo, do this!

Few events have marked as clear a turning point in American history as the gruesome race murder of a 14-year-old Chicago boy named Emmett Till visiting family in the Mississippi Delta on Aug. 28, 1955. Till was hardly the first Black victim of a lynching in Mississippi, but outrage over the boy’s monstrous death helped inspire the Montgomery bus boycott just three months later, and other seminal events of the civil rights movement. Now, author Wright Thompson is out with a stunning new book about the Till case — The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi — that calls attention to new revelations and unpublicized details about the case but, more importantly, also looks at the shroud of secrecy that still looms 69 years later. This is a must-read book.
Monday was a solemn day marking the one-year anniversary of the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas, which slaughtered hundreds of civilians that day and continues to hold scores of hostages. So Oct. 7, 2024, was a time to mourn and also pray for the release of hostages, but many saw it also as a time to reevaluate Israel’s response to the attack, which has killed an estimated 41,000-plus in Gaza, as well as the U.S. role in the war. In the New Republic, Matthew Duss, who’s been a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, is out with a harsh assessment of President Joe Biden’s handling of the conflict. Duss compares it to the Iraq War, writing that “both catastrophes were enabled in part by a U.S. president with strong ideological biases, a confidence in his own judgment as unshakable as it was unjustified, advisers unwilling or unable to push back effectively, and an elite media establishment with an overtly militarist bent and a shockingly callous disregard for Arab lives, far more interested in editorializing about college student chants than about sitting U.S. senators — that is, people with actual power — urging Israel to ‘flatten’ Gaza.” Please read the entire article.

Ask me anything

Question: Seeing Trump and GOP leaders lie about hurricane relief makes me wonder: is there anything left for them to lie about? — Fletcher McClellan (@mcclelef) via X/Twitter.

Answer: Yes. The problem is that the fantastical world that Trump, his running mate Sen. JD Vance and others have been creating — an America where immigrants are stealing and eating people’s dogs and cats and where venal politicians are robbing the hurricane-relief coffers to bring in more migrants — is not only to seek xenophobic votes but also to create a climate of total disbelief. That would enable the biggest lie of all, challenging the November election results. Indeed, these things are probably going to bleed together when Republicans claim that voting disruptions caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton are somehow to blame for Trump losing if Democrats take key states like Georgia or North Carolina. So hold on for a wild finish to a wild 2024.

What you’re saying about...

I was happy to get a spirited response to last week’s question about building a new Sixers arena on Market Street, close to Chinatown. Almost all of you disagree with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s support for the $1.55 billion scheme, writing that the project is a waste of money that could also be hugely disruptive to one of Philadelphia’s most storied neighborhoods. “Why put it downtown, ruining Chinatown, messing up traffic for many blocks (and near Broad and Market no less)?” wrote Frank Friedman “Let them take their billions and build some nice communal areas where the ballparks and arena are already located,” referring to the South Philly sports complex. The only letter of support came from Frank Keel, who said the project would bring jobs and prevent the 76ers from moving to New Jersey — and who also does PR for the city’s trade unions.

📮This week’s question: I’ve written a lot here about fracking, but not yet asked your opinion. Should we ban unconventional gas drilling in Pennsylvania, or is fossil fuel production a boost for the state’s economy? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Fracking ban” in the subject line.

Backstory on what Pennsylvanians really think about fracking

This summer, I wrote a column headlined, “Everything you know from TV about Pennsylvania and fracking is wrong.” Apparently that piece, which argued that pundits who label the Keystone State as pro-fracking are ignorant about the strength of the pro-environmental movement here, struck a nerve. Both MSNBC and NewsNation brought me on TV to talk about that, and whether Kamala Harris’ reversal on a fracking ban is actually good politics. This week, the Ohio River Valley Institute is releasing a new poll of Pennsylvanians, and 42% of voters still support an outright ban on fracking — unmoved from three years ago.

Officials with the pro-sustainability ORVI told me Monday that what’s arguably more significant about the 2024 survey of Pennsylvanians is that voter support for aggressive regulation of the natural-gas industry is nearly unanimous. They want rules for drilling companies to disclose any hazardous chemicals they use (94%), safer transportation of fracking waste (93%), air monitoring near fracking sites (92%), and increasing distances between drilling locations and schools and hospitals (90%). Supports for these tougher regs has risen substantially since the 2021 survey, when the percentages for those same questions were in the mid-70s. That’s likely due to increased publicity about the potential health hazards of fracking, including increased risk for a type of childhood cancer.

ORVI’s senior researcher Sean O’Leary said in a statement that “were it not for the barrage of unfounded claims from state policymakers that the industry is an engine for jobs, opposition would be even greater.” The poll numbers come four weeks out from an election in which Democrat Kamala Harris has leaned hard into her 2020 decision to abandon an earlier call for a fracking ban, even boasting that she cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to open up more leases. These poll numbers would suggest that if the vice president wants to shore up her liberal base in Pennsylvania, she should talk more about what she’ll do to curb pollution and phase out fracking as quickly as possible.

What I wrote on this date in 2008

Things change a lot in 16 years. On Oct. 8, 2008, the late and legendary longtime Flyers owner Ed Snider was still the boss and Sarah Palin was still relevant as the brash GOP running mate for Sen. John McCain. The younger me took great umbrage at the fact that the ultra-conservative Snider, calling Alaska’s Palin “the world’s most famous hockey mom,” had invited the candidate to drop the puck before a Flyers game at whatever the Wells Fargo Center was called back then. I wrote: “It will be a warm and fuzzy ‘hockey mom’ event that will make people forget about her ugly and hate-filled rallies of the last week, where she charged that the Democratic candidate for president ‘pals around with terrorists’ as a lynch-mob of an audience hooted and yelled out things like ‘kill him.’” Did I overreact in calling for fans to turn their back on Palin? Perhaps, but you can decide for yourself after reading: “Sarah Palin and Ed Snider’s game misconduct.”