In 1999, Hurricane Floyd roared through North Carolina as one of the state’s deadliest and most harmful hurricanes. It was the second major storm that month and the third in as many years to ravage the state. Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, was raised in the small Black community of Kinston, but “the neighborhood I grew up in no longer exists,” she tells me. It was rendered uninhabitable by the storm.

Twenty-five years later, on September 26, Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, breaking all of the state’s past records for death and destruction, as it carved a path of ruin across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. Patrick Hunter, a managing attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, lives in Asheville, whole sections of which were wiped away along with entire towns across western North Carolina.

“It’s really hard to put into words what the devastation looks like,” he tells me of his beloved mountain community, the sound of shock thick in his voice. “It’s hard to describe the sense of loss.”

Hurricane Helene is one of the worst storms in U.S. history, causing over $250 billion in economic damage. At least 224 people have died, almost half in North Carolina, where another 26 people are still missing, likely drowned in torrential waters or buried by mud. The death toll will rise in the years to come. The average hurricane in the U.S. ultimately causes the deaths of as many 11,000 people, with the most disadvantaged prior to the storm suffering the worst consequences in its wake.

An increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is the hallmark and long-predicted outcome of the burning of fossil fuels causing a worsening climate crisis.

“Climate change is here and we’re going to experience more of these types of events if we can’t address it,” Hunter says, exasperation finally entering his voice. “When we’re not taking the steps we need to take to reduce the effects of climate change… there are very real consequences.”

For Taylor-Sawyer and Hunter, that means righting environmental injustice, protecting public health and the environment, and transforming the region away from fossil fuel — the primary cause of the climate crisis — to renewable energy. They’re working with allies across the state to significantly deepen these efforts by tapping into billions of dollars in funding from the Biden-Harris administration.

Less than two weeks before Hurricane Helene struck, I’d been visiting communities across North Carolina to see how the Biden-Harris money is contributing to their organizing, what the investments look like on the ground, and the threats and opportunities presented by the looming November election.

As a key swing state, North Carolina could single-handedly determine the outcome of the Presidential election (some polls give Trump the lead). There’s also an extremely consequential gubernatorial race pitting Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

While Donald Trump has used Hurricane Helene as an opportunity to deny the reality of climate change and spread lies and conspiracy theories, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “are harnessing every agency and every authority to respond to Helene’s destruction and devastation,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “At the same time, we keep accelerating our efforts to build long-term resilience to extreme-climate disasters and attack the root cause of climate change itself.”

Historic levels of federal funding for climate action, the energy transition, and environmental justice are included throughout the over $2 trillion in the administration’s “Investing in America Agenda,” which includes the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan, and CHIPS and Science Act.

With its Justice40 Initiative, the Biden-Harris administration stipulated within days of taking office that at least 40 percent of federal climate and environmental funds, across 19 federal agencies and totaling some $613 billion, must target disadvantaged environmental justice communities. These are Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities who have been overburdened by pollution and the climate crisis, and underserved by government. An official with the Environmental Protection Agency tells me the agency has exceeded that bar, with over 60 percent of the funds serving those most in need.

It amounts to the nation’s largest-ever financial commitment to environmental and climate justice. “It’s unprecedented. I don’t think there’s any other time in history that there has been such a targeted plan to invest in disinvested communities,” Taylor-Sawyer says. “Just the EPA’s $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice program is 80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history.”

Since 2022, the EPA alone has awarded North Carolina over $1.3 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, according to new figures provided by the agency to Rolling Stone. These and other “Investing in America” funds are credited with directing over $19 billion in federal and private clean energy investments to North Carolina, resulting in the third-highest overall net growth in clean energy jobs in the nation.

I met dozens of people across North Carolina who have received or are applying for Justice40 and related federal funds, including the heads of environmental justice networks, small rural Black community groups tackling coal companies and hog farms, the mayor of Durham, Native American activists taking on oil pipelines and methane gas plants, and Southern Environmental Law Center lawyers battling just about everyone.

The funding is supporting air and water quality monitoring, zero-emission buses, protection of tree canopies and tree planting, flood mitigation, rooftop and community solar — including local “resilience hubs,” renewable energy and energy efficiency tax credits, and community education and organizing, among other efforts. The administration is also trying to do something that the federal government has rarely achieved before: directly engaging and funding frontline communities.

But they’re in a race against time. Harris plans to continue and expand upon these policies. But the funding and the climate and equity agenda it supports are under direct assault from Donald Trump, who calls the money Washington’s “green new scam.” Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation and authored by at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration, would eliminate all of the funding and the legislation that backs it. Congressional Republicans have also attacked the programs, accusing the administration of “funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to radical, far-left organizations whose mission is to protest, disrupt, and undercut United States energy production and leadership, while also freeing up funds to support their extreme activist agendas.”

“There’s a huge urgency,” explains Sherri White-Williamson, director of North Carolina’s Environmental Justice Community Action Network. “If things change on November 4, we know that money is not going to be there.” And critical work that’s just getting started, “just wouldn’t get done,” she says.