Abstract
This paper investigates whether United States Senators are more likely to vote in favour of environmentally friendly legislation following devastating damages by climate related natural disasters. We combine senatorial scores of roll call votes on environmental legislation with modelled state level human and economic natural disaster losses over a 44 year period. Our empirical results show that support for environmental legislation increases in response to unusual human losses but does not respond to unusual economic losses. We also find that the documented response to natural disasters is two years and short-lived. Geography, constituent partisanship, local economic condition and senatorial experience seem to affect the magnitude and precision of the treatment effect.