A building destroyed by Hurricane Ian on Fort Myers Beach, Fla., four months after the storm came ashore in September 2022. (Photo: Author)
May 19, 2024 by David Silverberg
One month after the earth experienced the hottest April in history, 16 days before the start of what is expected to be an extremely active 2024 hurricane season, five days after Tallahassee was hit with its worst recorded tornado outbreak ever, and three days before Southwest Florida was put under an extreme heat advisory, the government of Florida formally banned use of the term “climate change” in state statutes.
“Florida rejects the designs of the left to weaken our energy grid, pursue a radical climate agenda, and promote foreign adversaries,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stated in a May 15 posting on X.
“Global elites want to reduce the standing and influence of America and the west. Florida says no!” stated a graphic that accompanied the posting.
On that day, DeSantis signed House Bill 1645 into law, which rescinded language in state laws that tried to address or reduce factors contributing to climate change.
As the governor’s statement put it, the law repeals “Obama-era” climate policies. No longer will the state set clean energy goals or take climate change into account in setting state energy policy. It will no longer make an effort to take a leading role in promoting energy conservation or attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. No longer will state agencies try to hold meetings in facilities that acknowledge climate change and try to be environmentally responsible. No longer will state schools, agencies or local governments try to buy reduced-carbon vehicles.
Moreover, local governments are now prohibited from taking environmental actions on their own to reduce energy use or cut down on carbon emissions.
Gas appliances? They can’t be touched by laws or regulations. In fact, the law promotes the use of natural gas.
And don’t think of putting up a wind farm. That’s prohibited along Florida shores (not that Florida has any at the moment).
All this comes a year after DeSantis rejected $354 million in federal funding for improved energy efficiency.
At the time, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-14-Fla.), who had chaired the US House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, accused DeSantis of “pickpocketing Floridians, making the cost of living more expensive. We’re already paying higher property insurance than anywhere else in the country, higher electric bills. He has been a disaster for clean energy and environment in Florida.”
Florida’s latest anti-environmental measures are especially ironic—and self-defeating—given that they apply to a state that is probably the most climatically vulnerable in the country and the most impacted by climate change.
What’s more, they’re out of synch with the perceptions and sentiments of a majority of Floridians.
Facts and the future
In February the Environmental Defense Fund, a global, non-profit think-tank, specifically focused on Florida and the likely impacts of climate change, presenting its findings in a graphic, interactive presentation titled Florida’s Climate Future.
Spoiler alert: all the impacts are bad.
Thanks to climate change, when it comes to energy, Floridians can expect greater demands on the electric grid, rising electricity costs and inducing greater unreliability as the climate disrupts the supply. As it is, Florida is already the third-highest energy consuming state in the nation.
A graphic presentation of the energy impact of climate change on Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.
Given rising heat, there will be more deaths from heat, more wildfires and hotter sea temperatures. As of last August, Collier County had over 80 days with a heat index over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Lee and Charlotte counties had between 70 and 80. If current trends continue, in 26 years, 2050, Collier County will have 126 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees, Lee will have 112 and Charlotte will have 111. (And all this comes after the legislature banned cities, towns and counties from mandating heat breaks for outdoor workers.)
A graphic presentation of the heat impact of climate change on Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.
But the worst impacts will likely come in storms and floods. “Extreme rain events” like hurricanes are increasing in frequency and intensity and there’s no reason to expect that will change any time soon. The state’s flatness and extensive coastlines already make it uniquely vulnerable to flooding and storm destruction. Hurricane Ian in 2022 was the first hurricane to result in over $100 billion in estimated damages. This is all exacerbated by warming sea temperatures, rising seas and a moister atmosphere.
A graphic presentation of the impact of storms and floods due to climate change in Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.
These projections are not lost on property insurance companies who game out the state’s prospects into the far future. In addition to massive losses and payouts insurance companies have had to make for past disasters, the companies’ actuaries are telling their bosses that due to climate change, risks are rising with no prospect for change in the future. It’s a key reason that established insurance companies have fled the state and rates for Florida homeowners are skyrocketing.
A table from the Actuaries Climate Index showing the rising level of risk in the Southeast Atlantic region, which includes Florida. The red bars represent extreme weather events in each particular season. The black line is the level of risk. Note the frequency of the red bars after 2015. The interactive version of the chart can be accessed here.
Insurance companies aren’t swayed by the governor’s denials, the legislature outlawing climate change, or the votes of blindly fanatical climate deniers. They—and every other entity that has to weigh realistic choices—make decisions based on objective, scientific facts and rationally-determined risk.
By any calculation, the odds are very bad. So the companies have fled the state or are avoiding it altogether, to be replaced by less-established, questionable providers. Meanwhile, rates continue to rise for policyholders.
Analysis: Why the delusion?
In a state so subject to such obvious climatic changes, why does its elected leadership so resolutely refuse to acknowledge what is clearly underway?
Some answers seem obvious to even the most casual observer and they’re rooted in basic human nature.
There’s simple inertia, a refusal to acknowledge change in any form. There’s denial, the resistance to facing uncomfortable facts. There’s helplessness, a sense that no action will have any effect anyway.
Added to those are some political reasons peculiar to Florida.
There’s a fear of offending a constituency that’s older and resistant to change—which is also Republican.
Every spring and fall, Florida Atlantic University conducts a Florida Climate Resilience Survey to assess public attitudes on climate.
This year the survey, released on Tuesday, May 14, one day before the governor’s bill signing, found that belief in human-caused climate change had fallen among Florida Republicans from 45 percent to 40 percent—meaning that 60 percent of Republicans don’t believe human activity is a factor in climate change. That’s the 60 percent of Republican voters that Florida lawmakers need to win their primaries.
It also found that older voters are less likely to believe that human activity causes climate change than younger ones (50 percent of Floridians over 50 years of age don’t believe in climate change compared to 66 percent of Floridians under 50).
Given that older Republicans have a preponderant sway in primary elections, it’s far easier for Republican politicians to pander to this demographic than to serve the entire population of the state or do anything to halt or mitigate climate change’s ravages.
As DeSantis’ May 15 posting revealed, opposition to acknowledging climate change is also ideologically rooted. Climate-denying Republicans are still warring against the Green New Deal, a concept that sprouted in 2019 but has been moribund ever since, although it serves as a useful specter to scare a credulous base.
DeSantis has his own special anti-woke crusade that he had hoped to ride to the presidency this year. In his view, anything that smacks of concern for the environment or the planet or acknowledges climate change is lumped together under “wokeness” and is to be denounced and opposed.
DeSantis’ anti-environmentalism is somewhat poignant in that upon taking office in 2019 he drew a sharp distinction from his gubernatorial predecessor, Rick Scott (now senator). Scott had banished the term “climate change” from state government and resisted meeting with scientists to discuss the subject. (He ultimately met them, but only briefly.)
By contrast, DeSantis declared in his inaugural speech on Jan. 8, 2019: “For Florida, the quality of our water and environmental surroundings are foundational to our prosperity as a state—it doesn’t just drive tourism; it affects property values, anchors many local economies and is central to our quality of life,”
He continued: “We will fight toxic blue-green algae, we will fight discharges from Lake Okeechobee, we will fight red tide, we will fight for our fishermen, we will fight for our beaches, we will fight to restore our Everglades and we will never ever quit, we won’t be cowed and we won’t let the foot draggers stand in our way.”
Of course, all that was before his presidential ambitions fueled a culture war against everything “woke” including concern for the environment and the climate.
Now there is a new/old factor driving Florida’s climate change denial: Donald Trump.
Trump has long dismissed climate change as a “hoax.” He took the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord as president. In April, according to an account in The Guardian newspaper, he met with over 20 fossil fuel executives at Mar-a-Lago and promised to give them massive tax breaks and roll back environmental and climatic measures. These included barriers to drilling, a pause on gas exports, and new rules to cut car pollution—but there was an ask: he wanted $1 billion in campaign contributions in exchange.
“Meatball Ron,” having now bent the knee to Trump, has assumed Trump’s anti-environmentalism as well and so climate change denial is in full force in Florida.
Ironically, attitudes among the population of Florida are moving in a polar opposite direction. According to the Florida Climate Resilience Survey, 90 percent of Floridians believe that climate change is happening—even more than in the rest of the US population, where 72 percent believe it.
What is more, Floridians want state and federal government to do more to combat climate change: 68 percent of all respondents wanted more state government action and 69 percent wanted more from the federal government.
“Floridians support strengthening our resilience to the effects of climate change because they are experiencing it. The urgency to act means debate over causes is largely irrelevant,” professor Colin Polsky, founding director of Florida Atlantic University’s environmental school, stated when the survey was released.
While Republicans’ belief in human-caused climate change fell, that recognition surged among political independents, 64 percent of whom believe it, up 11 percent since the last survey in September 2023.
Republican rejection of climate change evidence is more pronounced in Southwest Florida than in the state as a whole.
There have been two regional surveys of public opinion regarding climate change. Both were conducted under the auspices of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. One was conducted a year after Hurricane Irma and released in 2019. The other was released in April 2022—but it was conducted before Hurricane Ian struck in September.
The 2022 Climate Metrics Survey of Southwest Florida found that “People who identify as Republicans are increasingly harder to engage with and persuade on issues of climate. Meanwhile, people who identify as Democrats continue to express significant concerns around climate change and support for solutions.”
Despite these partisan divides, “A total of 87 percent of adults say that climate change is happening either due to human activities (26 percent), natural causes (24 percent), or a combination of both human activities and natural causes (37 percent).” This was an increase from 2019, when 75 percent believed climate change was happening.
However, in 2022 there was greater cynicism about government’s ability to deal with the problem, less inclination toward taking action and greater fatalism toward stopping the change.
For all that, 85 percent of respondents favored modernizing the electric grid, 74 percent favored charging corporations for pollution they caused and 56 percent wanted their city or town to prepare for the impacts of climate change.
Did Hurricane Ian change any minds in Southwest Florida? It will be very interesting to see the next survey that measures attitudes after that storm—and after the 2024 hurricane season.
So taken together, all public opinion research indicates that the vast majority of Floridians believe there’s climate change, they’re acutely aware of it, they want something done about it, they believe government should take action to slow or mitigate it, and they believe humans are causing it to some degree.
However, in true Florida fashion, the state’s governor, its legislators and its whole top political echelon are moving in the exact opposite direction.
But facts are stubborn things. The governor, the legislature, climate-deniers and Donald Trump, Florida’s denier-in-chief, can deny that the climate is changing, they can legislate it out of existence in Florida law, they can prohibit speaking the words and they can (literally) stick their heads in the sand all they like—but the storms keep coming, the heat keeps increasing and the seas keep rising.
It seems that they won’t acknowledge the reality until the water is up to their eyeballs—and starts to boil around them.
Can everyday, sweltering Floridians make a difference? Of course they can, at the ballot box.
Climate change is a reality that no amount of propaganda, denial or delusion can erase. It’s up to Floridians who recognize that reality to reject candidates who deny it and vote like their lives depend upon it—because they do.
A lone American flag flies over a devastated Times Square in Fort Myers Beach immediately after Hurricane Ian. (Photo: U.S. Air National Guard /Jesse Hanson)
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg