Ron DeSantis Is at the Forefront of New Republican Climate Politics
By Paul Ejioma
There are two versions of the Little River neighborhood on the northern edge of Miami. Flipping through a thick stack of planning documents, the future of the neighborhood looks almost utopian: kayakers travel down a “blueway,” while homes have been raised to minimize flood damage.
Public housing facilities are renovated and refreshed to withstand the region’s increasingly precarious climate, and public transit hubs and widened sidewalks provide alternatives to high-carbon personal automobiles.
But the current reality on the ground looks very different. When I visited in early September, homeowners in the wealthy part of town along the waterfront were constructing private sea walls to keep water off their property—even if it means allowing it to drain into their neighbor’s yard.
Homes rely on septic systems, which can leak into front yards when big storms strike. A drab public housing facility relies on a giant external pump—wheeled in like a tractor trailer—to keep the sewage flowing.
There may be a lot of expensive work ahead to realize the city planners’ vision of residents living in harmony with the water. A surprising source is helping foot the bill: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-dominated state government.
Political headlines coming out of Florida in recent years have centered on DeSantis relentlessly stoking the nation’s culture wars, from his crusade against critical race theory to the state’s so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law to his opposition to mask mandates.
Yet in the background, DeSantis has championed a program to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to communities across the state to help them prepare for the sea level rise and worsening flooding that will result from climate change.
The Little River area has alone received commitments of more than $25 million in state funds. “The governor [wants] to deliver results to real problems that exist right now,” says Wesley Brooks, who DeSantis appointed as the state’s Chief Resilience Officer to oversee climate adaptation efforts, “and set the stage for better preparedness in the future.”
DeSantis’ program says a lot about the potential future of the politics of the fight against climate change in the U.S. In the past, Democrats have called for aggressive climate measures focused on bringing down emissions, while most Republicans have either dodged the conversation or rejected the science of climate change.
Yet DeSantis is a Republican leader of a purple state at the forefront of climate disasters. Just last week, Hurricane Ian ravaged the state, bringing Category 4 winds, tens of billions of dollars in losses, and at least 100 deaths. Already in Florida, the effects of climate change—from big storms like Hurricane Ian to the more quotidian flooding challenges—have made the issue impossible to ignore. The rest of the country will soon follow.
DeSantis has piloted a new Republican approach to climate change by spending money on climate adaption but not on mitigation. In other words, he has sought to pay for his state to adapt to a changing climate but not to address its greenhouse gas emissions, the root causes of climate change.
DeSantis’ Resilient Florida Program is politically savvy, passing nearly unanimously in a bipartisan vote in 2021 and receiving enthusiastic plaudits from local officials. And, experts say, it’s also good policy that will help allocate money to the places that need it the most. But it does nothing to cut carbon pollution, and DeSantis has dismissed such efforts as “left-wing stuff.”
And there’s another issue: adaption alone isn’t enough. Florida is at risk of hundreds of billions of dollars in climate damage in the coming decades; the program allocates hundreds of millions. Even with state adaptation funds, climate change presents a dire, potentially cataclysmic problem for the state.
There are lessons in Florida’s shifting climate politics. DeSantis’ embrace of climate adaptation is an indicator that climate change will lead even the most hardened ideologues to acknowledge the real harm caused by a warming planet. But his approach should also alarm anyone concerned about the future. We will all be in trouble if merely bracing for impact becomes a mainstream approach to address climate change in the U.S.
On the ground in South Florida
Over four days in early September, I crisscrossed the South Florida megalopolis to meet with local officials to see as many of the nearly 200 projects funded by the Resilient Florida Program as possible.
In Cutler Bay, 20 miles south of Miami, I saw a $1.5 million project aimed at restoring a canal bank to help drain flood water. In Miami, I drove by sea walls set to be replaced. In Delray Beach, I stopped by a gathering of local resilience officials who shared the urgent climate-linked challenges facing their communities and how they wanted the state to help.
It became clear that, no matter a community’s political makeup, DeSantis’ program helps. “We’re thrilled to have the ability to apply for these funds,” says Amy Knowles, the chief resilience officer in the City of Miami Beach. Joe Schmidt, interim climate strategy director at The Nature Conservancy in Florida, says the program has given cities the opportunity to fund projects that they have long known they needed but haven’t had the resources to pursue. “It’s huge,” he says.
Florida already faces a climate crisis. The Everglades have been hit by toxic algae blooms, caused by agricultural runoff and worsened by high temperatures where bacteria thrive, that threaten public health in the state.
City streets flood in Miami even on sunny days, blocking streets and stressing the sanitation system. More than a third of properties in the state face significant risk of severe flooding in the next three decades, according to Risk Factor, a nonprofit that models climate risk. And the unique composite of risk has already strained the state’s homeowners insurance market. Rates have risen dramatically for many residents and, even before Hurricane Ian, six local insurers had gone bankrupt this year.
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