by Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix
December 21, 2023

At Christmastime, we’re all encouraged to think about the less fortunate.

That’s why I believe all of us in Florida should send some warm thoughts toward Gov. Ron “I’m Never Gonna Be President, Am I?” DeSantis. The man’s presidential campaign has turned into such a disaster, I’m surprised FEMA officials haven’t rushed in to set up emergency shelters.

He’s dropped in the polls like a rock falling off the top of the 22-story state Capitol.

His super PAC has been unpacked. His major donors are fleeing like stockbrokers in 1929 running for the nearest window ledge.

And to add insult to injury, Nikki Haley keeps accusing him of being an environmentalist. The horror!

The onetime South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador has been smacking at DeSantis like he’s a cockroach crawling up her kitchen wall. Haley started this bizarre line of attack in September and continued it through this month, which means she thinks it’s working.

“He was praised by the Sierra Club. And you’re trying to make up for it and act like you weren’t a liberal when it comes to the environment,” she said during the Miami debate last month. (Sierra Club officials were quick to remind everyone that they’d given DeSantis an F on his overall performance.)

Haley “is increasingly targeting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on environmental issues, assailing his policy record on climate and energy in his state at multiple GOP presidential debates as the two jostle for second in the party’s primary,” a publication called The Hill reported recently.

Who would have ever thought our painfully awkward but extremely right-wing governor would be considered too liberal on any issue? It’s as if someone claimed Sen. Joe McCarthy was too lax in making up lists of pretend Commies.

Bear in mind that the man she’s attacking as if he were some sandal-wearing tree-hugger has never met a developer he didn’t like, tried to push unneeded toll roads through quiet rural areas and broke his promises to fix Florida’s water pollution problems.

And let’s not forget about his demented rants against nature-friendly investments, his veto of $100 million to buy conservation easements on Florida ranches and farms and his rejection of federal money to help Floridians buy energy-efficient appliances (which he’s now realized was a bad move).

No, nobody’s ever going to confuse DeSantis with a Florida eco-warrior like Marjorie Harris Carr.

Haley’s attempts to paint DeSantis as too green to be a true-blue – er, excuse me, red-state Republican, while ludicrous, also intrigued me. I called up a number of Florida folks and asked them:

When did saving the planet become a bad thing for some Republicans?

The endangered RINO

“What can I tell you? The Republican Party has lost its mind,” said Sally Bradshaw, who was Gov. Jeb Bush’s longtime chief of staff. (She now owns a Tallahassee bookstore and says she is MUCH happier.)

This may sound like an entry in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, but Republicans used to be leaders on environmental issues. And I don’t just mean Teddy Roosevelt, who among other things created the National Wildlife Refuge system starting with Florida’s Pelican Island.

Take Richard “You Think DeSantis Is Awkward? Look at Me!” Nixon, for instance. The Republican president with the habit of wearing dress shoes to the beach is best remembered now for resigning amid the Watergate scandal. But before that happened, he did a lot for the environment.

Nixon wasn’t a tree-hugger either. But thanks to the overwhelming public response to the first Earth Day in 1970, he realized that the environment had become a popular issue. That’s why he jumped on that bandwagon with both shiny black wingtips.

He created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, persuaded Congress to pass the Clean Air Act and blocked construction of both the destructive Cross-Florida Barge Canal and a massive airport that would have ruined both the Everglades and what became the Big Cypress National Preserve.

A Nixon aide, Florida man and Deputy Secretary of the Interior Nat Reed, played a major role in writing the Endangered Species Act and convincing Nixon to sign it. Reed never stopped being a Republican, but he never stopped being an advocate for the environment too. Among his many accomplishments: founding the smart-growth group 1,000 Friends of Florida.

I suppose Haley would sneer that Roosevelt, Nixon, Baker and Reed were RINOs – Republicans in name only — just because they cared about the planet where we live. But it sure seems to me that this is a topic that transcends party, and I am not alone in that line of thinking.

“We have a long tradition in Florida,” said Allison DeFoor, who served as Jeb Bush’s Everglades czar, “where environmental issues are bipartisan issues.”

When nature was bipartisan

One of the first people I always call about a Florida history question like this is Estus Whitfield, who served as environmental adviser to five governors from both parties.

“During my entire tenure with the state,” he told me, “the environment was always a top priority.”

Clay Henderson, a longtime environmental activist and the author of a history of Florida’s conservation programs called “Forces of Nature,” agreed. Republican politicians knew they had to pay attention to Florida environmental issues just like the Democrats did because of their popularity with the voters.

Whether the Republican in the governor’s office was Claude Kirk, Bob Martinez, Jeb Bush or Charlie Crist, “they all had arguably good records on the environment,” Henderson said. “They certainly didn’t think of it in terms of a party issue.”

Kirk helped persuade Nixon to stop the Cross-Florida Barge Canal and created the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Martinez pushed through America’s largest environmental land acquisition program, Preservation 2000.

Bradshaw reminded me that Bush, R-Punctuation Mark, “committed to Everglades restoration and went and got federal participation in it.”

And I recall how Bush, after a fateful canoe trip on the Ichetucknee River, launched the Florida Springs Initiative to save the bodies of water that Marjorie Stoneman Douglas once called “bowls of liquid light.”

That’s not to greenwash their reputations. For instance, Bush’s top regulator quit to take a job with a pulp mill that benefited from his intervention in a pollution case. But overall, they were far more concerned about the environment than some of their successors.

Crist was the first Florida governor to take steps to deal with the changing climate. He blocked construction of a coal-fired power plant near the Everglades, signed an executive order mandating that statewide building codes seek a 15 percent energy-efficiency increase and persuaded the Legislature to pass a bill calling for the state to pursue “market-based solutions” to reduce greenhouse gases.

When I asked what changed, both Whitfield and Henderson gave identical answers, telling me not “what” but “who.”

They blamed Rick “I Love the Smell of Environmental Destruction in the Morning!” Scott.

He’s against it

Do you remember the Tea Party? No, not the one in Boston where the colonists dumped British drink ingredients into their harbor, thus inspiring the Standells to compose “Dirty Water.”

I mean the one that started with the Fox-fed belief that Barack Obama was some kinda dadgum foreigner (he wasn’t) and maybe even a Muslim (not that either) and then called for decent folks to take back the country from the liberals, bureaucrats and that uppity president.

Because of their distaste for the gubmint, the Tea Partiers didn’t like all those environmental regulations, either. In fact, the chapter in Citrus County came out against rules to protect manatees.

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” one Tea Party leader explained. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

These are the folks who helped elect Scott governor. They supported him even though he was a billionaire with zero experience in government and a slight resemblance to Sir Patrick Stewart after a particularly painful root canal.

I think they backed him because in 2000 Scott gave a deposition in which he invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times. That convinced them he was a huge fan of the U.S. Constitution.

In his two terms as governor, Scott dismantled the state’s growth management system, laid off scores of state environmental agency employees, and pushed regulators to end prosecution of polluters in favor of “helping” them (i.e., giving them leave to do whatever they wanted).

In short, when it came to the environment, like Groucho Marx, whatever it was, he was against it.

The worst thing he did was ignore climate change and what it was doing to the state most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

“I’ve not been convinced that there’s any man-made climate change,” he said.

He methodically dismantled all of the programs that Crist started. By some accounts he decreed he didn’t even want to hear the term spoken, as if that would make it stop happening. And by and large, Florida’s Republican lawmakers went along with him.

“It was climate change that caused the changing position” on environmental issues, Henderson told me.

Bizarre flailing around

When the cowboy boot wearing Scott scooted on up to become the least popular member of the U.S. Senate, he was succeeded by the cowboy boot wearing DeSastrous – excuse me, DeSantis.

Unlike Scott, DeSantis has at least talked about our climate. Of course, it was all about how all attempts to end our dependence on dirty-burning oil and gas were just “left wing stuff.”

Recently, though, he acknowledged “the climate has clearly changed,” and then he said the way we should deal with it is by burning MORE fossil fuels, not less. Reaching this conclusion required more bizarre flailing around than Wednesday Addams dancing to the Cramps.

Haley complained that DeSantis, in his first term as governor, had opposed fracking and offshore drilling. She made it sound as if he’d opposed motherhood and apple pie.

What she failed to mention is that nearly everybody in Florida opposed fracking and offshore drilling. That’s because the fracking would be in Everglades-adjacent wetlands and offshore drilling put a coat of oil on the beaches of eight Florida Panhandle counties in 2010.

“Fracking and offshore drilling – those are the EASY environmental issues in Florida,” Henderson said.

Just out of curiosity, I checked on Ms. Haley’s position on climate change. Turns out it’s nearly as tortured as DeSantis’ evolution.

As the Trump Administration’s UN ambassador, she had to defend pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

“Just because we pulled out of the Paris accord doesn’t mean we don’t believe in climate protection,” Haley said then. “We’re not saying that climate change is not real. It is real.” (Her boss, meanwhile, has repeatedly called it a hoax.)

Her solution? Instead of curtailing fossil fuels, she wants to let cars, trucks, boats, planes and power plants keep burning ‘em up. But then she wants to somehow capture the carbon emissions before they reach the atmosphere.

That’s a popular position with the fossil fuel industry, which is understandable since they get to keep selling their products as if they weren’t the problem. But critics call carbon capture – wait, let me check the technical term here to make sure I’m spelling it right – “a scam.”

“The technology has devoured public funds, only to release more emissions than it’s removed,” Food and Water Watch reported earlier this year.

Carbon capture is sort of like saying that instead of trying to stop people from overdosing on meth, we should let drug addicts have as much as they want. But then the taxpayers will pay for pumping it out of them as fast as it goes in.

Where the G in GOP means green

What I can’t understand is why Haley and DeSantis think the way to appeal to Republican voters is to appeal to the fossil fuel industry. The two are not synonymous.

Henderson agreed with me. When he became president of the Florida Audubon Society in 1995, he said, he quickly learned that a lot of the members were Republicans. Just because they liked limited government didn’t mean they also liked polluters.

Those green Republican voters are still out there, he said.

“In 2020, there were land acquisition referendums in three Florida counties where Republicans dominated voter registrations,” he told me, naming Volusia, Collier and Manatee counties. “Trump won all three of those counties, but the land acquisition measures all passed.”

So this Christmas, send your warmest wishes to poor Gov. Declining-in-the-polls-Santis. Here’s hoping that he soon figures out that he was elected to represent the people of Florida, not the oil and gas tycoons.

After the year he’s had, he should expect Santa to leave nothing but coal in his stocking. As a fan of fossil fuels, maybe he’ll like that.

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