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Ron DeSantis can’t stop the climate crisis coming to Florida [1]
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Date: 2023-07
Given that I devoted last week’s column to the dangerous lack of urgency the Democratic leadership and the US legacy media are showing on the problem of climate change, I suppose it makes sense to check in on Florida this week.
I realise that in this column I have written more about Florida than any other American state, and indeed far more than I ever intended or wanted to. But it seems there’s just no avoiding Florida. I’m reminded of the time in 2015 I went to lease a car in Tampa, where I spent three years teaching at the University of South Florida, and the frankly obnoxious sales associate told me: “Tampa is like a fungus. You can leave, but you always come back.”
Leaving aside the point that this classic Florida Man reasoning would make “you” the fungus and Tampa the host, Florida itself, if not specifically Tampa, has always had a way of looming larger than life in the American imagination. And these days, Florida is not only a laboratory for the radicalised American right but also, because of its peculiar geography at the far end of the southeast coast, one of the handful of American states most directly affected by climate change. And that fact is causing problems for the so-called Sunshine State.
Last week, I focused on the troubling lack of attention to climate change in our national political discourse. But when we turn to state and local matters, climate change, economics, and politics are inevitably interconnected. And in Florida, to probably no one’s surprise, things get weird.
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Last year, the year hurricane Ian devastated the small city of Fort Myers and the surrounding area along Florida’s Gulf Coast, no fewer than six property insurance companies were declared insolvent. But instead of making good on an earlier commitment to address environmental problems including sea level rise, Florida governor Ron DeSantis created a $2 billion state subsidised reinsurance fund to bail out the insurance industry – an industry that happens to have funded his 2018 election campaign to the tune of millions of dollars. DeSantis also signed a law making it more difficult for homeowners to sue insurers. Florida homeowners facing increasingly unaffordable insurance premiums were left in the lurch – as they seem to be again now, with major home insurers pulling out of the state due to the heightened risk of hurricane damage caused by climate change.
Given his predecessor, fellow Republican Rick Scott, had literally banned the phrase “climate change” from state government documents, to Floridians who care about the environment it had seemed like a step forward when in April 2019 DeSantis said: “This idea of – quote – ‘climate change’ has become politicised. My environmental policy is just to try to do things that benefit Floridians.”
By 2021, however, DeSantis was responding to reporters’ legitimate questions about the issue with dismissive comments about “left-wing stuff,” and in 2022, in a clear parallel to his ban on funding for DEI offices in state universities, he banned state pension funds from making investments involving environment, social, and corporate governance (ESG) considerations, thereby protecting the fossil fuels industry.
DeSantis can make all the policies he wants, but rising sea levels are sure to have the last word in a low-lying peninsular state like Florida, where most residents live within 60 miles of either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean.
Florida’s sea levels are expected to rise by over 30cm from 2020 to 2050, and the already high levels are bringing larger and more destructive storm surges, as we saw during hurricane Ian. And real estate interests as well as insurers are getting the memo. As Newsweek reports: “The real estate company Zillow predicts one in eight Florida properties could be underwater by 2100.”
So how is the DeSantis administration responding now that insurance companies – prominently Farmers Insurance, a massive insurer whose website claims it serves over 10 million households – are pulling out of the state even after its 2022 bailout? In a word, badly.
DeSantis himself insists the bailout will ultimately work, claiming insurance companies will “wait through this hurricane season and then I think they’re going to be willing to deploy more capital to Florida.” He added, unhelpfully: “So knock on wood we won’t have a big storm this summer.”
Meanwhile, Florida’s chief financial officer (a statewide elected post), Jimmy Patronis, responded by issuing a statement implying “wokeness” was at work. He said Farmers will soon become “the Bud Light of insurance,” referring to an absurd transphobic tantrum from the American right over a sponsorship deal that brand made with transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who was publicly harassed and afraid to leave her home as a result.
Calling for “additional scrutiny” on Farmers and suggesting that its leaders are “about to get hauled before the Legislature [sic] to answer for their actions,” Patronis’s statement also – and though I’m not a lawyer, probably unwisely – appears to promise political retaliation for the company’s business decision to leave the state. This approach has not worked well for the DeSantis administration in its clash with Disney over the corporation’s public (and constitutionally protected) statement opposing Florida’s “don’t say gay” law.
DeSantis surrogates and administration officials have a habit of behaving cartoonishly on social media, and particularly Twitter, where Patronis posted his poorly edited statement. They rail against “wokeness”, retweet hate group Moms for Liberty, and, as many on the left call for boycotts of Florida over the state’s harsh anti-LGBTIQ policies and abortion ban, boast of the state’s population growth.
Indeed, according to US Census Bureau data, Florida was the fastest growing state in the union in 2022. But as climate change continues to make Florida less and less livable, the tide (so to speak) will inevitably turn at some point.
A policy of shrugging one’s shoulders and hoping the issue will go away – which is unfortunately as characteristic of the national political discourse as it is of the DeSantis administration’s approach to climate change – is clearly unsustainable. Floridians – especially the most vulnerable among them – will suffer disproportionately as the world continues to warm.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/ron-desantis-climate-crisis-florida-us-politics/
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