DAILY TRIFECTA: Denial Isn't Just A River Flooded By A Storm Surge
See, Hear and Speak No Climate Change
TITLE: Revisiting The Bill That Removed Climate Change References From State Law
https://bocamag.com/revisiting-the-bill-that-removed-climate-change-references-from-state-law/
EXCERPT: In late May, I wrote about the juxtaposition of Gov. Ron DeSantis signing legislation that removed climate change as a state priority while Floridians were enduring record unseasonal heat. The governor’s people blamed that on, well, summer.
After Hurricane Helene and with the approach of Hurricane Milton, however, the political ideology behind House Bill 1645 looks especially reckless.
To review, the legislation wiped out roughly 50 references in state law to combating “climate change.” According to the bill analysis, Florida’s priority now is to guarantee “an adequate, reliable and cost-efficient supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth.”
Among other things, HB 1645 repeals a slew of green energy grants. It makes it easier to transport natural gas —Florida’s largest generating source—from other states. It prohibits the construction of wind turbines within one mile of the coast. It prohibits local governments from creating alternative energy programs. It prohibits community organizations from banning gas stoves.
Yet Helene epitomized this new era of hurricanes fueled by global warming and the climate change that results. Jeff Masters, a former Hurricane Hunter who now blogs for Yale Climate Connections, wrote that hot tub-like temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico caused Helene to intensify more rapidly, collect so much moisture that rainfall flooded areas 500 miles from landfall, and pack a more powerful storm surge from rising seas. The same is happening with Milton.
If you saw the pictures of surge damage from Fort Myers to Cedar Key, consider that Helene passed roughly 110 miles offshore as the storm went north. Consider that the Monday morning forecast had Milton tracking at an angle almost directly into Tampa Bay—the state’s nightmare hurricane scenario.
As I wrote previously, critics of HB 1645 believe that Gov. DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature created it to please Florida Power & Light and the state’s other investor-owned utilities that rely on natural gas. The fuel is much cleaner than coal and cleaner than oil, but it still doesn’t reduce fossil fuel emissions enough to stave off the effects of climate change.
Sens. Lori Berman and Tina Polsky, the Democratic state senators who represent Boca Raton, West Boca and Delray Beach, voted against HB 1645. Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, the Republican House member who represents Boca Raton, voted for it. We spoke Friday.
“It’s possible,” Gossett-Seidman said, “that [the law] needs readdressing.” But why would Tallahassee enact something that so clearly runs against the state’s interest?
“Terminology,” Gossett-Seidman said. “It just seems like there’s some semantics that gets pushback.”
GOP phobia on this issue is not new. When Rick Scott was governor, he forbade state agencies to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” He remains a denier. In the wake of Helene, Scott said, “We just have to understand we’re having way more storm surge, for whatever reason. You don’t know why we are having more storm surge.”
In fact, we do. Consider another fact from Masters.
Tampa Bay last suffered a direct hit from a hurricane in 1921. Since then, the waters have risen roughly a foot. Would the three causeways from Tampa to St. Petersburg across the bay hold up against a 2024 surge?
HB 1645, DeSantis said, was a response to “radical green zealots.” Actually, cold-eyed capitalists such as Henry Paulson, who was George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, have called climate change a threat to the American economy.
That goes double or more for Florida, especially when it comes to the real estate industry. Zillow and Redfin now take climate change exposure into account when assessing homes. All those financial firms that fled from New York during the pandemic could flee Florida if the state looks vulnerable.
Then there are property insurance rates. In Florida, any direct hit on one area is an indirect hit on everyone.
TITLE: Hurricanes Milton, Helene underscore potentially devastating gaps in home insurance coverage
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4923111-hurricane-milton-helene-home-insurance-gaps/
EXCERPTS: The losses from Helene, which tore through the Southeast not even two weeks ago, are still being tallied up. Earlier this week, AccuWeather estimated the total costs of the storm damage could be as high as $250 billion.
Most of those losses weren’t covered by insurance, leaving those in the storm’s path with minimal resources to recover from catastrophic damage.
Because Helene’s damage was so concentrated in regions outside of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) traditional flood maps — zones where homeowners are required to buy flood insurance — the insurance industry has estimated that only around $5 billion of those losses are insured, PBS reported.
In western North Carolina, where some towns were effectively eradicated by Helene’s floodwaters, the percentage of homes covered for flooding may be as low as 1 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.
From the perspective of the insurance industry, the lack of coverage in the areas hardest hit by Helene made the storm a “very manageable loss event,” Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute told The Associated Press.
That offers a small silver lining to those outside the storm’s path, Karen Clark, founder of insurance analytics firm Karen Clark & Company, told Grist: The lack of high insurance payouts mean that Helene is unlikely to lead to widespread further retreats by insurers, who have increasingly withdrawn from disaster-prone regions such as the Gulf Coast and the California Sierra.
But for those who were impacted by the storm, that will be cold comfort indeed. On Monday, as crews in western North Carolina still searched for the missing, home insurance companies argued to state regulators that they should be able to raise home insurance rates in the state by 42 percent on average — and 20 percent in the 11 mountain counties hardest hit by the disaster.
The current gaps in insurance coverage also raise the possibility, Jeff Schlegelmilch of Columbia University said, that many devastated regions will not be rebuilt.
That’s not just a risk for homeowners, but also for the businesses that make up the commercial hearts of now-ruined towns.
“It’s going to be much more difficult for owners of small businesses and multifamily properties as they rebuild to find insurance that isn’t three or four times what they were paying before,” Alexandra Glickman, of insurance broker Arthur J. Gallagher, told The Wall Street Journal.
The storms also come amid a broader tumult in Florida’s insurance market.
The state Legislature passed a law in December 2022 to try to take the majority of people off the rolls of the state’s insurer of last resort, Citizen’s — which had swelled to 1.25 million active policies amid a broader rise in insurance costs.
This summer, the state is pushing more than half of those policies onto private insurers — and homeowners don’t get a say in who takes their policy.
This will likely make policies more expensive. State law in Florida caps the hike in premiums at 20 percent, but the average annual premium in the state is nearly $11,000 — four times the national average, according to Insurify.
And the shift comes as tens of thousands of Florida homeowners have discovered in recent years — after their homes have been wrecked — that the insurance premiums they have paid for years did not guarantee that their homes would be rebuilt.
In 2023, Florida insurers closed more than 75,000 cases without payment. Independent insurance ratings agency Weiss Ratings found that many large Florida insurers denied nearly half of homeowner claims.
A number of homeowners have taken legal action in response to the denials: In 2023 the state saw people suing their insurance companies for denying claims at a rate nearly 20 times the national average.
In policy terms, this has contributed to a vicious circle. Both in Florida and in similarly afflicted Louisiana, policymakers and industry officials have often pointed to lawsuits, rather than climate change, for the state’s rising insurance costs.
TITLE: Amid Hurricane Milton, Florida Republicans Aim To Block Climate Emergency Declaration
https://www.levernews.com/amid-hurricane-milton-florida-republicans-aim-to-block-climate-emergency-declaration/
EXCERPTS: As a hurricane intensified by hot ocean water now threatens to destroy the Tampa Bay region, Florida Republicans bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry are pushing legislation that would bar the president from declaring a climate emergency.
Reps. Greg Steube and Byron Donalds, both Republicans who have together received more than $175,000 from oil and gas interests over their relatively short careers, cosponsored the House version of the bill last year, which frames the climate crisis as a “false emergency.” Steube represents Sarasota and Charlotte Counties, both south of Tampa, and Donalds represents much of Florida’s Lee County — all areas under evacuation orders as of Tuesday.
Neither Steube nor Donalds returned the Lever’s requests for comment on Tuesday.
Both lawmakers cosponsored the legislation alongside seventeen other Republicans, including several that represent the Gulf Coast region threatened by climate-intensified hurricanes: Reps. Randy Weber (R-TX), Brian Babin (R-TX), and Clay Higgins (R-LA). So far this election cycle, these three representatives have received more than $190,000 from the oil and gas industry. Mississippi senator Roger Wicker (R) — who has received more than $1.2 million from oil and gas interests since 1993 — is cosponsoring the Senate version of the bill.
The bill’s backers claim that declaring a climate emergency — which could enable the government to end offshore drilling, accelerate clean energy production, and take other bold action — would weaken national security and jeopardize valuable fossil fuel interests.
A similar bill was introduced in the Senate in April 2022, where it was cosponsored by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FA), who received almost $242,000 from oil and gas interests that year. The legislation died in Congress.
The climate-emergency prohibition cosponsored by Steube and Donalds was first introduced in 2022, when it was sponsored by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WV) in the Senate and Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) in the House. So far this session, neither the House nor the Senate versions of the bill have made it out of committee.
The bill — dubbed the “Real Emergencies Act” — would bar US presidents from declaring a climate emergency using three federal laws that give the executive branch additional powers in times of crisis: the National Emergencies Act, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, and the Public Health Service Act. The proposed legislation would still allow for an emergency to be declared in the event of a hurricane or other climate change–fueled extreme weather.
Environmental groups advocating for Biden to use this authority to declare a climate emergency have mapped out ways that such powers could be used to more swiftly address climate change as Congress stymies aggressive climate action.
Using emergency powers could “lead a tectonic shift” in addressing climate change, environmental advocates say. They claim the move would allow the federal government to halt crude oil exports, end oil and gas drilling in federal waters, restrict international trade and private investment in fossil fuels, and expand domestic manufacturing of clean energy.
Yet sponsors of the Real Emergencies Act claim that declaring a “false emergency” on the basis of climate change will limit the country’s ability to “be energy independent.” Instead, they argue, Congress should “take steps to strengthen our national security by implementing” energy politics that “include our competitive advantage in fossil energy production.”
The companies behind that fossil fuel energy production have been lobbying on the matter.
In 2022, oil and gas company ConocoPhillips spent $560,000 lobbying Congress and other regulators on “planning for potential climate emergency declaration” and “general discussions” about their climate change action plan, among other issues.
Donalds received more than $54,000 in oil and gas donations in the three years following his first election to Congress in 2000, according to reporting by Politico. Altogether, the energy and natural resources sector contributed $77,155 to Donalds over that time span, making it the seventh largest industry sector to donate to Donalds’s coffers.
That support has continued. So far this election cycle, the oil and gas industry has donated more than $43,000 to Donalds, who is running for reelection this November. He has also received more than $25,000 from Koch Industries — a petrochemical empire founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Donalds was also among the Republicans that voted against $20 billion in disaster relief funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA in a stopgap spending bill that passed both chambers on September 25. The agency may be strapped for cash as hurricane season continues on, officials have warned.
Like Donalds, Steube has benefited from oil and gas contributions over his seven-year career, receiving more than $52,000 from the industry since 2017, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign finance and lobbying data.
Steube has a history of voting against environmental measures, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to set cleaner car and truck standards and efforts to reduce pollution and climate threats impacting communities on the front line of environmental and health hazards.
SEE ALSO:
How Republicans Who Voted Against FEMA Funding Reacted to Hurricane Helene
https://www.newsweek.com/how-republicans-voted-against-fema-funding-reacted-hurricane-helene-1965729
FEMA has $20 billion in disaster funding. Extreme weather means that isn’t nearly enough
https://www.fastcompany.com/91205916/fema-has-20-billion-in-disaster-funding-extreme-weather-means-that-isnt-nearly-enough
Can you afford to evacuate during severe weather? Many Americans can’t, poll finds
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article293708854.html
Almost 1 in 5 Americans Have Had To Flee Their Home Due to Extreme Weather
https://www.newsweek.com/almost-fifth-americans-have-flee-home-due-extreme-weather-1966441