Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses a news conference in Fort Pierce on Oct. 10, 2024, following landfall for Hurricane Milton, via screenshot from his Facebook page.
I have a terrific moneymaking idea, and I’ll let you readers in on it.
I want to create and sell a desktop calendar called, “The Silliest Things Your Governor Has Said.” I know ours has produced more than 365 entries. The only snag in my plan is that I don’t know if the other 49 states have governors who are as inclined to say silly things as ours is.
Gov. Ron “Nobody Is Allowed to Vote for Things I Don’t Like” DeSantis has set a high standard for low-wattage intellectual expression. Our Ivy League-educated chief executive has provided us with an inexhaustible supply of unintentional hilarity, from his decision to sell his balls to finance his campaign to his claim that the solution to climate change is to burn MORE fossil fuels, not less.
He delivered another gem last week. I swear, this one was goofier than a talking canine in a Disney cartoon.
When a reporter asked him about the role climate change played in making Helene and Milton into monster hurricanes, DeSantis first attacked the reporter for daring to ask such a thing. Then he claimed, erroneously, that trying to combat climate change would ruin our economy.
“I think you should be more honest about what that would mean for people, taxing them to smithereens, stopping oil and gas, making people pay dramatically more for energy,” he claimed. “We would collapse as a country, so this whole idea of climate ideology driving policy, it just factually can’t work.”
Just think, if he’d lived a century earlier, DeSantis would have been a staunch defender of the buggy whip industry. He would have voiced similar outrage toward those new-fangled automobiles for replacing horses with horsepower.
If Hurricanes Helene and Milton taught us nothing else, they showed us that we’re living in a warmer world where hot oceans fuel more destructive storms. We need to be ready for what’s headed our way.
Lest you doubt this is true, just ask someone in the property insurance industry. They know this state has become a far riskier place to live because of our fossil foolishness.
“It’s happening,” said Don Brown, a onetime Republican legislator from DeFuniak Springs and a 30-year veteran of the property insurance industry. “And if we don’t recognize it, then in 20 years we’ll have houses under water all up and down the coast.”
Too-short time horizon
Let’s dispense with the most basic objections first.
There’s evidence of climate change everywhere you look in Florida. It’s not just the more-powerful hurricanes and sunny-day floods, which keep getting worse.
It’s also the increasing acidity of our Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, the extreme gender imbalance among the sea turtle hatchlings climbing out of their nests in the too-hot sand, and the brutal heat waves that are killing our coral reefs.
Yet our duly elected dummkopfs have clung to the convenient untruth that everything is peachy and we shouldn’t even mention the two c-words.
Instead, they say, we should keep pumping those fossil fuels into the atmosphere like it’s not causing problems. That way, their contributors can keep on with business as usual.
DeSantis sneers that the folks who would rather see Florida take action on climate change than pretend it doesn’t exist are “the church of the global warming leftists.” But Brown hardly fits that description.
A more accurate term for him would be “realist.”
But he understands why politicians like DeSantis and our legislators are so reluctant to do anything to save our state from the threats we face.
“It’s hard to get policymakers to address it because their time horizon is two years or four years,” he told me. “Their time horizon needs to be much farther out — 20 years or more — if we want to protect our paradise.”
Solar farm built in Clay County. (Photo via Moss Construction)
Missed it
Another entry on my calendar is what DeSantis said about the “don’t say climate change” bill.
“Our energy bill that we did, it wasn’t about saying or not saying ‘climate change,’” DeSantis claimed, according to Politico. “It was a substantive piece of legislation to say that in the state of Florida our energy policy is going to be driven by affordability for Floridians and reliability. … We want low energy costs. And that means you’ve got to utilize things like natural gas.”
Meanwhile, our more realistic utilities are building almost nothing but solar farms. Why? Because the energy cost for gathering rays of sunshine is soooo much cheaper than the cost of burning costly natural gas.
I talked to Brown and several other folks about what Florida COULD be doing about climate change, if only our leaders weren’t so clueless. Not one of them suggested “taxing (people) to smithereens” or switching to an energy source that costs more than natural gas.
Instead, you know what I heard? Some common-sense ideas, many of which first came up slightly more than a decade ago, when we had a Republican governor and Legislature who cared more about our future than they did about campaign contributions.
The Legislature even passed a bill calling for the state to pursue “market-based solutions” to reduce greenhouse gases. In other words, Florida was going to set up a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions from power companies and other polluters, but also create a marketplace through which they could buy or trade credits to go over the limit.
Unfortunately, the next governor, now-Sen. Rick “I’d Rather Jump in a Pool Fully Clothed Than Play with My Noisy Grandkids” Scott, killed every single one of these measures.
Every time I think about Scott’s failure to follow through, I picture Maxwell Smart telling his boss, “Missed it by THAT much.”
Vital to Florida’s future
If we do nothing to counteract climate change, we will wind up paying a steeper and steeper price for adapting to our warmer world.
Take building codes, for instance.
No, wait, don’t fall asleep! This is important!
When Charlie Crist was governor, he issued an executive order mandating that statewide building codes seek a 15% energy-efficiency increase.
“I think that as a state beautiful as Florida is, we need to be a leader controlling climate change and protecting our natural resources,” Crist said then. “It’s vital to Florida’s future.”
When I talked to Brown, he mentioned building codes as a good step for Florida to take in dealing climate change. But his first step calls for making construction stronger and less vulnerable to wind and waves, because we know they’re going to get worse.
This building code wouldn’t be mandatory, he said. But to encourage its use, people who follow this building code could claim deductions of 25% or 30% percent on their property insurance, he said.
He sent me a report from building experts that’s full of recommendations produced in 2019. It even includes a section on bill language to implement its ideas into state law.
“There are multiple things we could be doing,” Brown told me. “But the report is just sitting on a shelf.”
Nobody in authority wants to upset the powerful (and generous) construction industry.
I’d say it’s time to revive the energy efficient building code goals, except DeSantis clearly doesn’t like energy efficiency. Just last year, one of his vetoes wiped out the seed money needed for Florida to get what would have been $346 million in energy efficiency funding from Washington.
I’m sorry to tell you that he didn’t explain his veto, so we can’t include his reasoning (or lack thereof) in the calendar. Maybe he was too embarrassed to mention he’d sold his soul to the folks in the fossil fuel industry and wanted us to burn as much of that stuff as possible.
The role of government
Another silly entry for my calendar is DeSantis’ recent comments on rebuilding after Helene and Milton wiped out entire communities. He insisted that the state couldn’t possibly steer any rebuilding to areas less likely to be washed away.
“The reality is, is people work their whole lives and work hard to be able to live in environments that are really, really nice,” he said during a press conference. “It is not the role of government to forbid them or to force them to dispose or utilize their property in a way that they do not think is best for them.”
Because he’s never worked in local government, I guess DeSantis is unfamiliar with the concept of “planning and zoning.” That’s how you steer development towards or away from certain areas. Keeping people alive sure seems like an important state interest.
Vivian Young via 1000 Friends of Florida.
One person I talked to about this was Vivian Young of the pro-planning group 1000 Friends of Florida (if only we had that many friends these days). She explained that market forces are already pushing storm victims to move out — but meanwhile allowing other people to move in.
“What we’re seeing in communities that have been hit by hurricanes,” she said, “is that people who lived there are pushed out by higher income people who can afford to self-insure.”
That’s bad news for us taxpayers, she said. While the people who move in there might be wealthy enough to pay for making their homes hardened to withstand these monster storms, she said, “that doesn’t take into account that the infrastructure — roads and water and sewer to serve those residents — are paid for by all the taxpayers.”
This is where those high taxes DeSantis warned about would come into the picture as we foot the bill for the super-wealthy folks who can afford to live in risky areas.
“More sprawl simply doesn’t pay for itself,” Young told me.
Rabbits and steel
This week, someone in a Miami roundtable asked the Palm Beach club owner and convicted felon whom DeSantis has endorsed for president what he thinks about solar power. The answer was: Not much.
“It’s all steel and glass and wires,” he said. “It looks like hell. And you see rabbits get caught in it … it’s just terrible.”
He’d much rather see us drilling for more oil and gas, regardless of the cost both to our environment and our pocketbooks.
Rabbits aside, I think more solar power and less fossil fuel use would be good for Florida. So does the state’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light, which is working to install more than 30 million solar panels by 2030 and make Florida a world leader in solar energy.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Defense Fund put out a report pointing out that solar is cheaper than natural gas, so the state should do more to encourage its use.
The EDF report also spoke highly of energy efficiency. By cutting back on what we use, we save money, just like the cheapest source of water is water conservation.
“By investing in homegrown energy sources, like solar power, and enacting energy efficiency measures, we can break the energy insecurity loop — saving Floridians money, strengthening our energy grid and reducing harmful climate emissions,” the EDF report noted.
Dawn Shirreffs of Environmental Defense Fund, via EDF
Dawn Shirreffs of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Florida operation said we should be doing sooooo much more solar.
“We could be making and exporting solar energy and it could be a huge economic driver, rather than importing natural gas from other states and paying for that,” Shirreffs told me recently.
Heck, we could even help financially strapped homeowners install solar panels on their roofs. Last year we were one of just six states that failed to apply for funds from the federal government’s $7 billion “Solar for All” pot.
Florida’s failure to apply for the Solar for All money came with zero explanation. Maybe it was simply, as the warden put it in “Cool Hand Luke,” “a failure to communicate.” Here we are in a new year, so maybe we can try again.
Here’s something truly amazing. You know who would have been a big advocate for increasing solar in Florida? The newly elected governor named DeSantis.
“I am supportive of programs that will provide Floridians with greater access to affordable, clean energy which will help propel the state to a healthier future,” he said five years ago. “We live in the Sunshine State and solar energy is a natural resource that should be seriously considered. … As Florida’s energy needs continue to grow at a rapid pace, it is important that we diversify our energy resources.”
Thank heaven he stopped talking like that, or I’d have no material for my Dopey DeSantis calendar.