In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, regardless of your politics. That’s the one hottest state – Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer – and many homes and businesses are clustered along beach areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
But the same politicians do not seem ready to admit the cause of these problems. A bill awaiting the signature of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, loosen regulations on natural gas pipelines and remove most mention of climate change of existing state laws.
“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to delete it sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit. in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Florida, that this is not a priority for the state.”
As climate change has been swept up in the nation’s culture wars, it has created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats — and see it as a pretext to push a progressive agenda — so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question and replied, “We don’t do any leftist stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what is behind it.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Bobby Payne, a Republican from Palatka in north-central Florida, would strike eight references to climate change in current state laws, leaving just seven references untouched, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the bill’s proposed language changes are minor, but others repeal entire sections of laws.
For example, it would eliminate a “green government grant” program that helps cities and school districts reduce their carbon emissions. A 2008 policy declaring that Florida is at the forefront of climate change and can reduce those impacts by reducing emissions will be replaced with a new goal: providing an adequate, reliable and cost-effective supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth.”
Florida politicians have a history of trying to silence conversations about fossil fuel emissions that are raising sea levels, heavier floods and exacerbating toxic algae blooms. When Rick Scott was the state’s Republican governor from 2011 to 2019, state officials were ordered to avoid the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” in communications, emails and reports, according to the Miami Herald.
It foreshadowed what would happen at the federal level after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. The phrase “climate change” began to disappear from the websites of federal environmental agencies, with the use of the term declining 38 percent between 2016 and 2020. “Sorry, but this web page is currently unavailable for viewing,” Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change website said during Trump’s term.
Red states have shown that politicians do not necessarily have to acknowledge climate change to adapt, but Florida appears poised to take the strategy to the extreme, removing climate goals from state law while focusing more and more money on addressing their effects. In 2019, DeSantis appointed Florida’s First “Chief Resiliency Officer,” Julia Nesheiwat, tasked with preparing Florida for rising sea levels. Last year he told the Florida Department of Environmental Protection more than $28 million to conduct and update flood vulnerability studies for each county in Florida.
“Why would you address the symptoms and not the cause?” Arditi-Rocha said. “Fundamentally, I think it’s political maneuvers that enable them [Republicans] to continue to distinguish themselves from the opposite party.”
She is concerned that the bill will increase the state’s dependence on natural gas. The fossil fuel provided three-quarters of Florida’s electricityleaving residents subject to volatile prices and energy uncertainty, according to a recent Environmental Defense Fund report. Since Florida is not a particularly windy state, she sees the proposed ban on offshore wind energy as mostly symbolic. “I think it’s more of a political kind of tactic to differentiate themselves.” Solar power is already a booming industry take off in Florida — it’s called the Sunshine State for a reason.
Greg Knecht, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, believes that removing climate-related language from state laws could discourage green industries from coming to the state. (And he’s not ready to give up on wind power.) “I just think it puts us at a disadvantage to other states,” Knecht said. Prospective cleantech investors may see this as a sign that they are not welcome.
The bill is also out of step with what most Floridians want, Knecht said. According to a recent survey from Florida Atlantic University, 90 percent of the state’s residents accept that climate change is happening. “When you talk to the citizens of Florida, the majority of them recognize that the climate is changing and want something to be done above and beyond just trying to build our way out of it.”
