In early 2020, with state health officials downplaying signs of an impending pandemic, Josh Green, then Hawaii’s lieutenant governor, stepped out of the political pecking order and called the White House himself to ask of a temporary ban on cruise ships, a linchpin of Hawaii’s economy.
The step of Mr. Green, an emergency-room physician, has angered his colleagues and the governor’s office, but “no one will listen to me here,” he said in his Capitol office overlooking Honolulu last week.
Now the 53-year-old governor, a Democrat less than a year into his first term, is dealing with the horrific wildfires in Maui that have killed at least 114 people and possibly more.
Thousands have been displaced. One of the world’s most beautiful beach towns is now a toxic ruin. President Biden will arrive on Monday to view the damaged landscape and hear from residents.
And after two mega-emergencies in less than four years in a state with a population smaller than Philadelphia, Mr. Green has some urgent thoughts about the array of disasters sweeping the world and so many institutions.
“I want the world to know that we have to prepare for this,” the governor said last week, his voice tense, his eyes red with fatigue. “We really need to solve these problems before they become crises.”
Hawaii’s firestorms are the latest climate-induced horror to challenge leaders across the country. Last year, Gov. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is the most destructive Atlantic hurricane season on record. Gov. California’s Gavin Newsom was just two days away from his election when 85 people died in the 2018 Camp fire.
Violent floods ravaged New York and Vermont this summer. Extreme heat is plaguing Arizona and Texas. Trauma and grief, followed by costly recoveries and lawsuits, have become key components of governance as climate change exacerbates weather extremes.
“This is going to be the biggest crisis that Hawaii has had to deal with since Pearl Harbor,” said Colin D. Moore, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Already fault lines have emerged in the Democrat-dominated power structure.
In a state where political decisions are often a balancing act among factions — from progressives to progressive Democrats to powerful labor unions — some worry that the rush to re construction will destroy hard-earned environmental and cultural protections. Others fear the destruction will damage the economy, drive up high housing prices and increase a middle-class exodus of teachers, firefighters, nurses and other essential workers.
“The fear is that this will be a land grab by wealthy investors from outside of Hawaii,” Professor Moore said.
That concern also reflects Hawaii’s inherent political tension between the state’s stunning natural beauty and the tourist-dependent economy that supports its 1.4 million residents.
Wayne Tanaka, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said the governor’s own new policies seem to undermine his calls for stricter planning. Mr. Tanaka criticized an emergency measure signed by Mr. Green shortly before the fire; the move suspended some development restrictions as a way to fast-track the supply of affordable housing.
“It will be a big test whether he will challenge and reverse the trend of allowing corporations to dictate land use policies and monopolize water resources,” Mr. Tanaka said.
Others fear political drag as usual, noting that the governor’s chief of staff — who joins him from the lieutenant governor’s office — is a former lobbyist for the pro-development Hawaii Council of Carpenters.
“I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I’m very concerned,” said Matthew S. LoPresti, a progressive who served with Mr. Green for six years in the state legislature. “This will be the test of his leadership.”
Even Mr. Green said that bringing a state back from one climate disaster in a way that can escape the next requires political skills beyond what he has been asked to muster in the past.
“This is the first time for me as an executive that I’ve been tasked with something outside of my absolute comfort zone,” he said. “It is not difficult for me to deal with Covid because I am a health care provider who practices public health.”
Mr. Green, who was born in Kingston in upstate New York and grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, has an unconventional political story. His father ran a family-owned civil and structural engineering company; her mother was a local organizer for the National Organization for Women. He joked that when his parents went to Woodstock, “he was there in utero.”
He was born deaf, he said, but wasn’t diagnosed until he was a toddler. His hearing was surgically repaired, but the loss left him with speech challenges that took years to overcome.
“I’m very competitive and driven, and a lot of it comes from that,” he said. “It has to be overcome and reached.”
Mr. Green graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, then from medical school at Pennsylvania State University. (He displayed an impressive stash of Pittsburgh Steelers memorabilia in an office shrine.) In his final year of training, he went to Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, on a medical mission; after completing his residency in 2000, he joined the National Health Service Corps, which assigned him to rural Hawaii.
For the next four years, he said, he cared for about 8,000 mostly Native Hawaiian and Filipino patients as a family practitioner and an emergency room physician on the Big Island.
“We couldn’t get drug treatment, we couldn’t get trauma services,” she said, “and I started speaking up and was told, ‘If you know so much, why don’t you run for office?'”
Mr. Green campaigned in scrubs for his legislative district and was elected. A week after arriving at the Capitol on Oahu, she said, she met her husband, Jaime, a lawyer who clerked for a state senator. He held two jobs, as a legislator and an emergency physician for the next 18 years until he became governor.
At the Capitol, Mr. Green was not part of the progressive wing of his party or a player in the mainstream party apparatus, Professor Moore said. After focusing on homelessness and public health as a lawmaker, Mr. Green ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and won again. He received major support from a political action committee tied to the carpenters union, which sought to unseat Jill Tokuda, a progressive state senator who was then a front-runner and later elected to Congress.
When Covid hit in 2020, David Ige, who was then governor, informally made the administration pandemic Mr. Green. But their relationship wasn’t always harmonious, and early calls to cruise lines gave insights that Mr. Green is campaigning early to replace Mr. Ige, who was prevented by term limits from running for re-election in 2022.
Eventually, the governor formalized Mr. Green’s role as the Covid liaison. Using a whiteboard and raw data, he recast himself as the face of Hawaii’s response to the pandemic, pushing for mandatory vaccines for public sector employees, indoor masking for businesses, and quarantines or proof of vaccination for travel to the islands. Apart from a few small protests outside his home, there has been little of the public unrest that has plagued other states.
In the spring of 2021, as infection rates decline, a poll conducted by two local news organizations found the lieutenant governor had a 63 percent approval rating, nearly three times that of Mr. Ige. A year later, Mr. Green defeated six other Democrats in the primary and easily won the general election.
As governor, he stopped practicing medicine except as a volunteer; a state law that took effect in 2022 prohibits governors from holding second jobs while in office. But he has made headlines several times for providing care in emergencies. In July, Morning Consultation only two other governors were reported to have higher approval ratings from their constituents.
Then Maui was struck. As the storm battered the historic town of Lahaina, the governor was more than 5,000 miles away at a family reunion in Massachusetts.
He immediately flew home and helped secure billions of dollars in federal aid through a federal disaster declaration. He also opened motel rooms and rentals to displaced survivors, vowed to crack down on land speculators and include locals in recovery work crews. He also ordered the attorney general to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the causes of the fire and the emergency response.
But that came amid a host of response problems.
Outside sirens were never deployed. Cellphone sites lost power, preventing people from receiving emergency alerts. The roads to escape the town are impassable. And firefighters had a hard time getting water.
Now there are complex decisions, from how to preserve Lahaina’s character to whether to move power lines underground.
Mr. Green said the last four years have taught him that communities no longer have a margin of error.
“I’m angry that we didn’t do some of the things that we could have done three, five, seven years ago to make an incident like this pretty much impossible,” he said, the old Covid whiteboard in his office now covered by wildfire statistics.
“Because something like this doesn’t have to happen. We will rise but at a great cost.”