What’s running hot and what’s running cold in Florida?
Hot: Florida’s climate catastrophes.
Not: The DeSantis Presidential campaign.
Florida’s seas aren’t quite boiling – yet – but they are approaching hot tub temperatures.
That’s bad news for coral reefs, marine life, human beings and other living things.
And it’s not just warm seas. Florida’s environmental plagues seem to be multiplying by the hour.
Red tides, green algae, fish kills, flesh eating bacteria and other ever more exotic diseases. Hot, hot, hot.
Meanwhile, our absentee governor seems to be doing the frog thing in reverse. Floating in a tub of tepid water that cools so slowly he doesn’t even notice the coming freeze.
Cold, cold, cold.
DeSantis wants to make the rest of America like Florida. By which he means anti-woke, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-education anti, anti, anti…..
But the rest of America doesn’t want to be like Florida…or at least like Ron’s Florida. And who can blame them? DeSantis politicizes virtually everything else, but he doesn’t want to “politicize” weather. Which is just another way of ducking the climate change thing.
When it comes to Florida’s red hot environment our biggest problem is that we’ve got a Great DeSanitizer when we need another Claudius.
Claude Kirk (1966-1970) was Florida’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. They called him Claudius because of his flamboyant mannerism and the sheer joy he took from politics and governing (in stark contrast to our DeSanitizer who is neither flamboyant or joyful.)
He laid the groundwork for the modern Florida Republican Party when the Democrats were still running everything.
Oh yeah, he also signed the legislation that brought Disney World to Florida. DeSantis hates Disney for saying “gay.” Kirk loved the jobs Mickey brought with him.
But what really separated Claude from Ron is that he was as green as he was red. Arguably Florida’s first conservationist governor, Kirk championed the Everglades, founded the Department of Environmental Regulation, helped kill the Cross Florida Barge Canal and fought a running battle with Big Sugar over its polluting ways.
“He was brash, rude, domineering, inventive, determined and marvelously good-humored,” Nathaniel Reed, the Hobe Sound millionaire who served as Kirk’s dollar-a-year environmental Jiminy Cricket, said when Kirk died in 2011.
“He never wavered in his determination to change Florida’s long legacy of what Philip Wiley described as Florida, ‘the polluted paradise.’”
“Kirk could be very stubborn, but he could be convinced to change his mind. For instance, he once supported the cross-state barge canal and the Big Cypress jetport and the development of what is now Biscayne National Park. But when presented with the facts of environmental damage each project would create, he turned and became an ardent and effective opponent of all boondoggles,” said Reed.
DeSantis fancies himself a “Roosevelt Republican” but his environmental creds are paper-thin. He most recently signed a ban on local governments prohibiting nutrient-laden fertilizer use during the rainy season, when they do the most damage to state waters.
This from Time magazine:
Florida is a bellwether for the rest of the nation; the surge water rise that besets Miami today will, soon enough, beset states ranging from California to New York. The state, of necessity, should be a leader in U.S. climate resiliency.
But rather than acknowledge a crisis and build out a holistic approach to climate change, Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, denies the urgency and applies a hodge-podge of contradictory initiatives designed for short-term applause. Some come with large amounts of money attached, while the state simultaneously ignores the peril of poorly regulated industrial-scale farming, ranching, and development that intensifies the crisis.
Ruinous policy in Florida affects 11 million acres of wetlands, thousands of lakes, more than 1,300 miles of coastline, and hundreds of freshwater springs.
From rock pine to salt marsh, from sandhill scrub to lush semi-tropical ravines and dozens of other unique ecosystems—the point lost on DeSantis and the Republican legislature is that these are not tourist sights housed in an amusement park, but vital parts of the actual world that humans occupy and need to thrive, perhaps even to survive.
The Great DeSanitizer doesn’t care about Florida’s environment and it shows. Claudius would be heartbroken if he knew what has become of the modern Florida Republican Party he helped invent.
This is Claude Kirk, Governor of Florida. Do you read my press? Then you know that I’m a tree-shakin’ son of a bitch.
Not to mention a tree-huggin’ SOB.
FreeGNV 