Since 1996, the republican party had full control of the Florida House, Senate and Executive office. They have used that to systematically favor developers and special interest groups over the interests of our citizens, including greasing the permitting processes for developers to circumvent environmental considerations and avoid costly infrastructure to safeguard us against climate change driven storms.
Negative environmental impacts related to housing and industrial developments, may not be in the forefront for some people for a variety of reasons. For example, they may be located remote from the affected areas and not directly impacted. A similar lack of immediacy relates to global warming impacts, unless they are directly impacted, say due to property damage. Global warming is also a slow-moving phenomenon where sea level rise is sometimes measured in inches per year. The urgency to act now is lost on some because they do not realize that time for reversing human activities that feed global warming has already passed some tipping points to limit global warming, and we now need to combat even higher future temperatures. The learn more about additional environmental issues we are facing in Florida, please visit DECF here. Florida specific challenges include water quality, destruction of critical wetlands, current and historic industrial pollution, and preservation of fauna and flora.
One would expect that a collection of minds such as in the various branches of Florida’s government (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) would counteract ignorance on topics related to the environment. Sadly, the past 30 years and in particular under the DeSantis Administration, that is not the case. Rather, they pass and hide the real nature of legislation behind false narratives of “Protection” of this, or “Common sense” on that in order to appease their large political donors at the expense of our citizens.
In order to expose this, a small number of related Bills since, say 2019, will already reveal the truth about what has and continues to be done by his administration, with full support of my incumbent opponent, Will Robinson of District 71:
Time is rapidly running out for us to leave an environment for our children and future generations to enjoy what we take for granted. Roughly 70% of Americans acknowledge that climate change is a serious problem today, and an even greater share say it will be for future generations.
Below are the results of current surveys:
