Chabot Downplays a Decade’s Worth of Climate Emergencies, Including Hurricane that Devastated Ohio

On his blog on Wednesday, Steve Chabot decided to embrace climate misinformation and once again showed why he is unfit to represent Ohioans at a critical time for the environment.

In his post, Chabot decries the notion that climate change is resulting in more powerful storms and then makes this appallingly false claim:

“Reminds me of the same predictions their ilk made following Hurricane Katrina, that climate change was going to mean more hurricanes and more powerful, and deadlier, ones at that. Then for the next 10 years, not one hurricane hit the US coast. So much for their breathless predictions.”

Chabot is not just wrong but outrageously and offensively wrong. According to NOAA, the U.S. faced 11 hurricane landfalls in the decade following Hurricane Katrina, including three more that same year, resulting in hundreds of deaths and nearly $200 billion in damages across the country.

And while Chabot wants to pretend it didn’t happen, that group includes 2008’s Hurricane Ike, one of the costliest storms in Ohio history, causing over $1 billion in damage and several lives lost. 

Ike was the second-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history at the time and has since moved down to seventh, in a sign of how increasingly powerful and damaging storms are. Since Ike in 2008, Harvey (2017), Maria (2017), Sandy (2012), Irma (2017), and Ida (2021) have all resulted in even costlier catastrophe.

The New York Times put it simply: There’s a solid scientific consensus that hurricanes are becoming more powerful. And they certainly didn’t skip a decade.

“Steve Chabot’s assertion that a decade of storms that took lives and caused billions in damages never happened is not just a flat-out lie, but totally disrespectful to those who lived through them, including his own constituents,” said DCCC spokesperson Abel Iraola. “With the climate changing all around us, we need leaders who will confront this challenge swiftly and effectively. Meanwhile Chabot is writing blogs on the internet showing that he can’t even remember major disasters that affected his own district.”

See Also: Steve Chabot Cashes in $37,000 from Polluters Before Voting Against Clean Water

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