Chantal Wrecks Havoc in North Carolina as State Lawmakers Try to Repeal an Ambitious Climate Change Goal – Inside Climate News

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Perched above the Bolin Creek Trail, 46,000 tons of coal ash appeared to be intact Monday afternoon, the mound’s slopes anchored by bushes and vines.

But at the foot of the ash pile outside its fence, the force of the floodwaters from Tropical Depression Chantal had evicted large trees from the banks of the nearby creek. Rocks larger than bowling balls had caromed off one another. A dead crawdad lay on the trail, washed out from the creek. The air smelled vaguely of sewage. 

Early Sunday morning, Tropical Storm Chantal had blown ashore in South Carolina, and by the time it meandered into central North Carolina, it had weakened to a tropical depression. 

But by nightfall the impacts felt akin to a hurricane: 5 to 10 inches of rain fell within 12 hours. 

Dams burst. Interstates closed. Roads washed away. The Haw River reached historic levels, rising as much as 22 feet in four hours, engulfing parts of Saxapahaw. Hillsborough officials advised residents to boil their water after parts of the treatment plant flooded. More than 17,000 Duke Energy customers lost power.

Eighty people who live along the Eno River in Durham had to be rescued, and another 63 were displaced in Chapel Hill. First responders had to conduct 13 water rescues near Southern Pines. One elderly woman in Chatham County died when her car became trapped in floodwaters.

Storms like Chantal—and Hurricane Helene, which technically had been downgraded to a tropical storm when it devastated western North Carolina last September—are at least in part attributable to a warming world, according to climate scientists. 

Warmer air holds more moisture. The 2020 North Carolina Climate Science Report cited a study whose modeling showed an increase in the number of intense hourly rainfall events. North Carolina-based experts concluded that it’s likely severe thunderstorms in central North Carolina will happen more often. 

Durham is already experiencing more extreme storms and precipitation events, according to the county’s 2023 Community Health Assessment, including a 129 percent increase in heavy precipitation events from 2005 to 2014 compared to the 1950s.

Yet a majority of North Carolina’s state lawmakers seem to ignore the scientific evidence. Two weeks before the storm, the state Senate had joined the House in passing Senate Bill 266, titled “The Power Bill Reduction Act,” that, in addition to providing utilities with financial incentives for natural gas and nuclear energy, would allow Duke Energy to cancel its interim carbon reduction goal of 70 percent by 2030. The utility would still have to achieve net zero by 2050.

Rep. Dean Arp, a Republican from Union County, co-sponsored the bill, with outspoken support from utilities, the American Petroleum Institute, the N.C. Chamber and manufacturing interests. Arp called it a “responsible, prudent bill.”

“People ask, ‘Why not just delay those interim goals instead of repealing them?’” Arp said on the House floor.

For bill opponents, planning is the point, a critical step to reaching net zero. “Our planet’s on fire: hurricanes, storms, wildfires, deadly heat, droughts, crazy weather,” said state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Guilford County. 

By eliminating the interim goal, it will be more difficult to achieve net zero by 2050, she said.

Senate Bill 266, coupled with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rollbacks of greenhouse gas rules, will give North Carolina utilities carte blanche to pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air. The power plants’ emissions will accelerate the pace of climate change with near certainty.

“Science is unforgiving,” said Rep. Abe Jones, a Wake County Democrat. “This bill isn’t smart or realistic. Nature will have its way.”

Helene’s Survivors and Climate Trauma

Nine months ago, Colleen Daly eyed the floodwaters that surrounded her apartment complex south of Asheville.

The day before, Hurricane Helene had made landfall in Florida. Then, on Sept. 27, 2024, the storm surged up the spine of the Appalachians and flattened swaths of western North Carolina.

Yet even as the floodwaters rose, Daly believed the storm’s ferocity would soon pass.

We’ll be on this island, she thought, but we’re going to be OK.

Daly soon met a woman who had sought refuge in the apartment building. The electricity was out. No one had cell phone service or running water. 

“‘I came here thinking there would be power,’” Daly said the woman told her. “‘I came here thinking that I could use my machine, that there might be extra oxygen. I don’t have any oxygen left.’”

Daly said her husband and a neighbor swam a quarter of a mile to the Fletcher fire station, where they got an oxygen tank. They swam back, she said, holding it over their heads as the water continued to pour in.

Daly told her story one evening in mid-June at a People’s Hearing, held in Asheville at the Highland Brewery Event Center, an airy, vaulted room illuminated by sunbeams bending through wide windows and overhead strings of retro Edison bulbs. 

Against a backdrop of purple, red and white signs that read “People Over Polluters” and “Stop EPA’s Climate Chaos,” two dozen hurricane survivors, local officials and environmental advocates gathered on stage to testify about the trauma they experienced during Helene and the historic storm’s connection to climate change.

Event organizers recorded the testimony to send it to the EPA. Earlier this year, on what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described as “a historic day at the EPA,” he formally proposed two regulatory repeals for power plants, Inside Climate News reported at the time: the end of greenhouse gas rules and mercury and air toxics regulations. 

The economic benefits to the fossil fuel industry would total $20 billion over the next two decades, Zeldin said. 

Yet that figure is dwarfed by the estimated costs of Helene’s destruction in western North Carolina alone, according to state officials—$60 billion—and the years of recovery that lie ahead.

“The testifiers are here to demonstrate that they are proof that climate change is a real threat,” said Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, “and we need more protections from climate pollution, not less.”

In North Carolina, eliminating the interim carbon reduction goal would save ratepayers $13 billion, bill supporters said. Senate Bill 266 would also permit Duke Energy to pass the financing costs of new natural gas and nuclear plants to its customers, with permission from the N.C. Utilities Commission. This would save $1.5 billion in future interest, bill sponsors said.

An analysis written by three N.C. State University environmental engineering professors contradicts that figure. They estimated removing the interim target would not reduce power bills, but instead could cost ratepayers up to $23 billion in added fuel expenses over the same time. 

Companies would increase natural gas generation by nearly 40 percent between 2030 and 2050, the analysis suggested, and those fuel costs are expected to rise. 

Demand for gas turbines has increased their cost by twofold, according to S&P Global, and wait times can range from one to seven years.

“I can’t overstate how removing our carbon goal is not a good idea,” said Harrison, the representative from Guilford County. “This bill promotes natural gas and nuclear at the expense of cleaner energy sources. It’s not balancing environmental goals.”

Bill supporters are justifying a massive fossil fuel infrastructure buildout happening in North Carolina to meet the energy demands from massive server farms called data centers needed to power energy-hungry AI applications and crypto mines.

Zeldin, the EPA administrator, has also cited data centers to justify the need for fossil fuels. “Coal and natural gas power plants are essential sources of baseload power that are needed to fuel manufacturing and turn the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world,” Zeldin said in a press statement.

Data centers often operate in secrecy, making it difficult to know where they plan to locate and to ascertain the amount of energy they use. 

Microsoft required Person County officials to sign a non-disclosure agreement as part of the county’s sale of a 1,350-acre megasite to the tech company. The land is adjacent to where Duke Energy plans to build two new natural gas plants and Enbridge intends to construct a new eight-mile segment of natural gas pipeline.

Neither Microsoft nor the county has announced what will be built on the tract, but a legislative presentation by the American Petroleum Institute earlier this year listed it as a data center. 

The Costs People Bear

An hour before the People’s Hearing, it began to rain. So intense was the deluge that a car’s windshield wipers could not keep pace with the torrents. From Black Mountain through Swannanoa into East Asheville, mud pooled around mounds of debris that over the past six months had been extracted from the riverbed. 

Near the North Carolina-Tennessee border, flash flooding triggered a new landslide that closed a segment of Interstate 40, which had only recently re-opened after Helene.

Suddenly the skies cleared. The sunlight took on an amber hue. Thunderheads the color of a deep bruise marched east.

As a baby, Brian Campbell was baptized along Black Creek at the headwaters of the Swannanoa River. Years later, he married his wife there. 

“This valley has always been a place that’s felt safest and most like home,” Campbell said at the People’s Hearing. 

Campbell is the executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Last September he had just returned to North Carolina from several meetings with global experts on climate change and health. 

Shortly before midnight, he awoke to heavy rain and wind and, he said, “to the low hum of the Swannanoa River, which I’d never heard before. This normally quiet stream was now churning.”

His family and several neighbors walked down a hill. They stood in silence and watched as whitewater crews rescued unhoused people from a rooftop alongside the MANNA FoodBank, which was engulfed in water, Campbell said.

“We know climate change has real and devastating consequences, and we know the only way to solve this is through strong local, state and federal leadership,” Campbell said. “The EPA must do its part regulating carbon and other harmful emissions. And we must protect federal investments in clean energy, in health care and health research and environmental justice and in community recovery and resilience. These policies and investments save lives, and we refuse to sit quietly while they’re under attack.”

Senate Bill 266 is not yet law. On July 2, Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed it.

“This bill not only makes everyone’s utility bills more expensive but it shifts the cost of electricity from large industrial users onto the backs of regular people,” Stein wrote in his veto message. “This bill walks back our state’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions, sending the wrong signal to businesses that want to be part of our clean economy.”

A few Democrats joined Republican lawmakers in supporting the bill. If that margin holds, there will be enough votes for an override. 

On Monday, the day after Tropical Depression Chantal reminded far too many North Carolinians of previous hurricanes, workmen with chainsaws sliced up trees that had fallen across highways, business owners mucked out storefronts and tow trucks hauled away soaked cars. Over 15,000 people were still without power as temperatures soared into the 90s. 

Yet more rain is forecast for later in the week.