Florida’s Citizens Lose Out On Federal Climate Funding Due To DeSantis’ Trickery
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Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, seems bent on destroying everything he touches in our delightful state. Think how DeSantis’ dangerous push for a six week abortion ban has hurt women. How he’s alienated LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. How he twists the stories about immigrants — I see the helicopters zoom up and down the Atlantic coast, searching out desperate people escaping anguished lives.
As if those moves aren’t harmful enough, earlier this week DeSantis and the Department of Environmental Protection announced that they would do something oddly non-environmental: the Great Outdoors Initiative would commercialize several of Florida’s largest state parks — envision pickleball courts, golf courses, and hotels. Details of the proposal include plans for the development of a 350-room lodge, 18-hole and 9-hole golf courses, and pickleball courts on state park lands. Thousands of environmental advocates and activists descended on state parks on Tuesday in a day of action to protest against not only the ravaging of broad swathes of wildlife habitat. Even a whole bunch of Republican state congress members and senators refused to support the projects, relating that the plans had been drawn up in secret, with no-bid contracts.
Those items, though, pale in comparison to the way that DeSantis has welcomed with open arms and big smiles the hugely influential Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, which has a particular goal to extinguish any and all efforts to transition the state to clean energy. The connection between DeSantis and the Heritage Foundation helps us to connect the dots regarding how, in 2023, DeSantis quietly rejected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal energy funding.
It also darkly forebodes a long uphill battle by Florida’s citizens, who must now fight to live in a clean environment without the benefit of available federal funding assistance.
In Florida, DeSantis and his feckless, greedy GOP cronies act insulted about clean energy. They have done everything in their power to repeal clean energy targets and banning offshore wind projects. In doing so, they’ve shored up fossil fuel industries in Florida, making its citizens breathe in, subsidize, and suffer under dirty power. Not satisfied simply with holding onto Big Oil and its subsidiaries, the state’s officials don’t speak about the state’s steep energy rate increases.
Fossil fuel generation is now at 80% of supply, the highest in three years.
As Oil Change International puts it so eloquently, politicians like DeSantis “are trying to build escape hatches to suck every last ounce of profit out of their dirty fossil fuel business.” At at time in which Florida and the rest of the US absolutely requires a comprehensive and speedy rejection of fossil fuels and a correlating just transition that focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, DeSantis admits that he is “not a global warming person.” His narrow, permissive perspective allows fossil fuel companies to keep extracting oil and gas. Nowhere are there substantive plans to transition to renewable energy.
The Insidious Influence of the Heritage Foundation on Florida’s Citizens
From 1997-2013 the Heritage Foundation was a member of Cooler Heads Coalition (CHC) — an echo chamber for climate denying organizations to promote fringe ideas on climate science — The CHC is one of the longest running association of climate change denying organizations. The Heritage Foundation’s heaviest investor is Koch Industries, a vast private conglomerate of oil pipelines and refineries, chemicals, timber and paper companies, commodity trading firms, and cattle ranches.
Together, the Heritage Foundation and Koch Industries have developed a staggering record of corporate environmental malfeasance. They have:
- pushed for the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement in 2016;
- promoted wind power misinformation; and,
- paid massive fines for oil spills, illegal benzene emissions, and ammonia pollution, among so many other climate crimes.
Heritage and its lobbyists have fed campaign finance-hungry conservative legislators the means and method of right wing policy proposals — including handing legislators the bill language for their anti-ESG legislative crusade. The plan has worked extraordinarily well. For example, the SEC now requires a baseline transparency around climate risks and emissions, yet only “large accelerated filers” and “accelerated filers” must disclose Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
The Heritage Foundation — that regressive think tank of the scary Koch brothers, Philip Morris, and other corrupt corporate sources — is doing everything it can to cease Florida’s climate and clean energy programs, reinvigorate oil drilling, and infuse safeguards and even more subsidies for fossil fuel companies as they confront becoming stranded assets.
As part of DeSantis’ tirade against “woke” energy-efficiency standards, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’s Office of Energy notified the Energy Department in 2023 it was “respectfully” withdrawing applications for the funds after DeSantis issued a line-item veto for a $5 million federal grant for the state to set up programs to distribute the rebates, as Bloomberg reported. DeSantis also rejected a $24 million federal grant from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that would have been used to upgrade rural wastewater systems.
A sane person would think that, with Florida’s problems with rising sea levels, hurricanes, flooding, and biodiversity loss, the state would be seeking every possible funding opportunity to offset its tremendous environmental burden.
Heritage’s take down of ESG policies in Florida is just a starter for what real demolition of clean energy action to come. Faced with growing losses from floods and increasingly extreme weather, major insurers are pulling out of the state. Florida homeowners are scrambling to find coverage and, when they do, are paying some of the highest insurance premiums in the country.
Of course, the Heritage Foundation has hidden how, inspired by idiotic culture wars, Floridians suffered under former President Donald J. Trump’s neglect of US manufacturing. Moreover the last four years have seen a plethora of Biden-Harris-led manufacturing construction projects breaking ground in US red states — but not Florida, thanks to DeSantis and his cronies.
Final Thoughts about DeSantis
The Project 2025 platform and all its intentions to unravel democracy would close the doors on federal agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Peer-reviewed science would be sidelined, and polluters’ economic interests would be prioritized in government decision-making.
You need to become familiar with Project 2025, which is available for view online in pdf form as part of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” series, or you can use a rainy afternoon to read the 922-page book. And, if it doesn’t rain, read it anyway.
Needless to say, we’ll also be cheering in 2027 as DeSantis will be termed out of office. Aubrey Jewett, political science professor at the University of Central Florida’s school of politics, security, and international affairs, suggests, “Without a clear political path forward to something bigger, he really is just one more lame duck governor with two years to go … It becomes a little more difficult to influence people because they know you’re going to be gone.”
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