Florida is blessed with 825 miles of beaches. It will need them all because Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently wants the state’s 23 million residents to bury their heads in the sand regarding the world’s most serious environmental crisis: global climate change.
DeSantis has signed a law to delete the words “climate change” from state statutes, as though erasing the words erases the threat. Worse, the law removes climate change mitigation and clean energy goals from the state’s explicit policy priorities.
Without climate governance, the people will be climate victims — and Floridians are especially vulnerable to the effects of global warming.
Florida was the hottest state in the nation last year; sea-level rise is accelerating there; sunny-day floods are increasing; and home hazard insurance is the most expensive in the country. Public health experts have ranked Floridians as the most climate-vulnerable people in the United States.
Elderly and low-income Americans suffer most from climate-induced weather disasters. Florida has the country’s highest number of senior citizens, with nearly one in five residents over age 65. It ranks third in the nation for people living below the poverty level. Two-thirds of its population lives near the coasts, exposed to hurricanes, rising sea levels and floods.
A poll last month found that 90 percent of Floridians believe climate change is underway, and nearly 70 percent want the state and federal governments to do more about it. Nevertheless, the new law adheres to the bone-headed doctrine of the Republican Party and its presidential nominee that climate change is not an issue.
This is the “ostrich effect,” a reference to the myth that when ostriches sense danger, they bury their heads in the sand and assume they’re safe. Unfortunately, that leaves their posteriors exposed.
Climate change only gets more deadly when it’s ignored. It’s already tragic in Florida, which has suffered 24 weather disasters in the past five years costing more than $1 billion each. Sixteen have occurred in the last three years.
The First Street Foundation, which analyzes global warming’s impacts on real estate, expects the frequency of tidal flooding from rising sea levels on Florida’s coasts to grow from a few days a year to 30 to 60 times per year in 2030 — and more than 200 times per year in 2050.
Like the rest of the U.S., Florida is threatened by a “climate bubble” in real estate, First Street says. It warns that housing in the U.S. is overvalued by $200 billion because home values don’t count climate risks.
Florida is the poster child. First Street says 1.8 million of the state’s properties were at substantial risk of floods in 2020 and were overvalued by more than $50 billion. The bubble puts the state’s overall economy at risk because real estate accounts for much of the state’s GDP — 22 percent in 2018.
Since Florida is not an island, its risks have national implications. For example, nearly 5 million property owners in the state have filed flood damage claims with the federal government since 2000. As that number grows, all of America’s taxpayers will pay for the downsides of Florida’s climate-denial law.
Life in Florida will be no day at the beach. The same is true in other states led by climate-change deniers. When it analyzed last year’s “State of the State” addresses by governors, Georgetown University found that 60 percent expressed concern about climate change.
What about other states? The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School found that over the last four years, Republicans in the Arizona Senate voted to ban public funding for any government program addressing climate change; the Ohio Senate considered a bill forcing universities to teach climate denial; lawmakers in Montana proposed a bill that would discourage science education about climate change (as well as gravity and cell theory); and the Texas Board of Education amended its curricula guidelines to discourage criticism of fossil fuels and give weight to the argument that natural cycles are mostly to blame for climate change. Lawmakers in Iowa, Connecticut, Oklahoma and South Dakota also considered legislation encouraging teachers to challenge settled climate science.
Climate deniers in leadership often say they’ll deal with weather disasters without acknowledging climate change. But America must deal with the cause of climate disasters as well as their effects. The causes are fossil-fuel consumption and development patterns that allow people to build where disasters are likely.
Maybe Congress should stop rewarding negligence by withholding federal disaster assistance for any state that hides its head in the sand about climate change.
William S. Becker is a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author of several books on climate change and national disaster policies, including the “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet” and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods.”