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President Joe Biden visited Ft. Myers, Florida, yesterday to get a look at damage from Hurricane Ian and to say presidential things about coming together to rebuild, reassuring Floridians the federal government would do its part to help. In his remarks, Biden said, “We’re not leaving. We’re not leaving until this gets done. I promise you that,” just as he’d given similar assurances to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona. And according to all reports, the federal emergency response to both disasters is going well, as it should.
Asked about Gov. Ron DeSantis’s response to the hurricane, Biden said “I think he’s done a good job,” and DeSantis, earlier in the day, praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its help, saying, “We are cutting through bureaucracy, we are cutting through red tape,” to get help where it’s needed. He said Florida was “very fortunate to have good coordination with White House and with FEMA from the very beginning of this.”
Biden also addressed the main reason hurricanes have been getting more powerful and causing greater flooding in recent years, pointing out that the effects of climate change are being felt nationwide:
More fires have burned in the west and the south-west, burned everything right to the ground, than in the entire state of New Jersey, as much room as that takes up. […] The reservoirs out west here are down to almost zero. We’re in a situation where the Colorado River looks more like a stream.
There’s a lot going on, and I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there’s climate change, and we should do something about it.
The Guardian notes that while Biden said that, “DeSantis, standing behind the president’s left shoulder, shifted his feet slightly and blinked but remained expressionless.”
That’s because if you want to run for President as a Republican, which DeSantis very much does, you don’t go around saying crazy stuff like “science is real.” And as the New York Times reported yesterday (gift link), DeSantis is no different from the other guttermuppets in his party. Florida Republicans are dead set against doing much of anything to reduce greenhouse emissions, but their state is on track to face devastating effects in the climate emergency. They would like federal dollars to rebuild, as long as you don’t say they’re building back better. Hell, they even welcome funds that will help mitigate the damage from climate change, as long as you don’t say too much about why anything needs mitigating.
Read More: Ron DeSantis Too Busy Spending $$ On ‘Sea Level Rise’ To Think About Commie ‘Climate Change’
For that matter, as we pointed out here at Wonkette in December, DeSantis himself supported passage of a great big spending bill aimed at mitigating the effects of sea level rise and flooding across the state, although you won’t find the words “climate change,” “greenhouse effect,” or “global warming” in either the text of the bill or DeSantis’s public statements about it.
As we noted, when a reporter asked DeSantis about what steps he planned to take to reduce greenhouse emissions, he waved that woke liberal science right off, explaining,
What I found is, people, when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We’re not doing any left-wing stuff. What we’re doing, though, is just reacting to the fact that, OK, we’re a flood-prone state, we do have storms. […]
Be very careful of people trying to smuggle in their ideology. They say they support our coastline, or they say they support, you know, some, you know, difference, our water, environment. And maybe they do, but they’re also trying to do a lot of other things.
Stuff like turning America communist or using tax incentives to promote adoption of home solar, which are exactly the same thing.
The Times story mentions that resilience program, which is actually pretty good for what it does, with a billion dollars in infrastructure resilience spending that dares not speak its name. On the other hand, the Times notes, in August this year, DeSantis blocked Florida’s pension funds from considering companies’ environmental records in making investments, a move he bragged in an announcement would prioritize “the financial security of the people of Florida over whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow.”
Most of the Times story focuses on the anti-climate stances taken by Florida’s two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and former governor Rick Scott, who both voted against last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law even though it provides $50 billion to help states prepare for disasters like Ian. Such wasteful spending, they whined. And like every other Senate Republican, both voted against this year’s big climate bill, which will do more to reduce greenhouse emissions than any other measure the US government has ever taken.
Read More: Have We Mentioned Just How Amazing The Climate Bill Is? Let Us Do So ONCE MORE
Just to be clear, Hurricane Ian was definitely made worse by the effects of climate change, as the Times ‘splainers:
As Hurricane Ian approached Florida’s coast, the storm grew in intensity because it passed over ocean water that was two to three degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, NASA data show. Its destructive power was made worse by rising seas; the water off the southwest coast of Florida has risen more than seven inches since 1965, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Finally, warmer air resulting from climate change increased the amount of rain that Ian dropped on Florida by at least 10 percent, or about two extra inches in some places, according to a study released last week.
The Times does note that, like DeSantis, it’s not too unusual for Florida Goopers to vote for some things that will help prepare the state for the effects of warming, as long as nobody forces them to say why anyone needs to make the state more resilient. Rubio has helped get money for protecting and restoring the Everglades, which will help absorb floodwaters, and to restore coral reefs that can reduce storm surge from hurricanes. In the House, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart has also voted for mitigation funding.
But damned if any top Republicans want to talk about cutting emissions, because that’s blasphemy in the GOP. Rubio griped in a 2019 op-ed that we simply can’t afford to get off the fossil fuel teat, framing it as a religious war against pagan tree-huggers:
To be clear, attempting to reverse engineer the U.S. economy to absolve our past climate sins — either through a carbon tax or some “Green New Deal” scheme — will fail. […] Despite the high costs, none of those advocates can point to how even the most aggressive (and draconian) plan would improve the lives of Floridians.
Cleaner air will radically reduce lung disease, and there’s probably some economic benefit to the peninsula not being underwater by the end of the century, you are welcome Mr. Senator. Rubio also casually dismissed the economic benefits that will come from the transition to green energy, because of course he did.
Similarly, Rick Scott has insisted that of course climate change is real but we have to address it without putting jobs at risk or spending any money, tra-la.
The weird thing here, the Times points out, is that unlike many red states, Florida simply doesn’t have a hell of a lot of fossil fuel industry — offshore oil drilling is banned off the Florida coast, and donations from fossil fuel interests don’t rank very high on the donor lists for either Rubio or Scott. To be sure, Scott, as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, knows how much the GOP depends on oil and gas company funding, so there’s that. But despite the potential for Florida to power itself with solar and offshore wind — which doesn’t leak! — ideology trumps economics every time.
Also, there’s the hypocrisy of Republicans like Rubio and former congressman DeSantis, who both voted against funding disaster aid for the Northeast following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. But they were against the wasteful parts of that recovery bill, which they’re sure were in there. Please send money soon.
UPDATE: Oh! Darn us, we were in a hurry to get this posted and forgot to include this fine nugget from the Guardian: For all of his for-the-cameras pretense that he’s being all statesmanlike with Biden during the emergency, DeSantis just couldn’t stop stoking culture war this week, insisting that mean old liberals had actually been rooting for more people to die in the hurricane.
And in an interview with a conservative media outlet on Tuesday, DeSantis claimed the “national regime media” was rooting for Hurricane Ian to strike the Tampa Bay area “because they thought that’d be worse for Florida”
Yr. Wonkette regrets the omission.
[NYT (gift link) / Guardian/ CNBC / Image generated by DreamStudio Lite AI]
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