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“I think what this has finally ended is the discussion about whether or not there’s climate change,”President Biden said in Florida Wednesday, standing amid the wreckage of Hurricane Ian in a striped shirt and his trademark aviator glasses.
Nice thought, but Biden knows it’s not true. Millions of Americans think climate crisis is an invention of the deep state, or a conspiracy designed to take away their God-given right to burn as much coal, oil, and gas as they want.
But Biden’s comment wasn’t directed at them. It was for a guy standing right behind Biden as he spoke, scowling in a blue blazer: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
For DeSantis, the climate crisis is just another battlefield in the culture wars, no different from the evils of transgender bathrooms or a “Woke Disney.” “What I’ve found is, people, when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways,” DeSantissaidat an event last year. “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.”
Let’s pause for a moment and consider the idea of the climate crisis as a left-wing plot. What exactly does that mean — that it’s a conspiracy to give more Americans cheap, clean electricity? A trick to indoctrinate school children in the corrupting ways of science?
I have no idea what DeSantis really thinks, but I do know that he is a Florida hustler, not a Florida fool. He knows damn well that climate change is real, that it is fueling the destruction of Florida now, and that it will only get worse in the near future. He’s even willing to spend money onflooddefenses, as long as nobody mentions climate change. He also knows it’s a good issue to provoke outrage among voters and rake in big bucks from fossil fuel companies, old world power utilities, and anyone else who profits by maintaining the status quo. It’s all a big game for DeSantis and his disciples: indulge the conspiracy, trash the science, pretend it is all fake news that is being sold to you by what hecalls“the national regime media.”
So what if it gets people killed? So what if it just accelerates the investment in high risk areas and leaves the state of Florida woefully unprepared for what is coming? DeSantis has his sights set on the Oval Office. And you don’t run for president in the Republican Party by talking about the climate crisis or cutting the consumption of fossil fuels, much less ask voters to do hard things like pay more for flood insurance in high risk areas or, god forbid, design policies that prevent people from building back in high-risk areas. The idea of returning any part of the coast to nature is the equivalent of seceding territory to the enemy. The whole history of Florida is about subduing nature and paving over the swamps. Why change now?
More importantly, DeSantis knows that disasters are useful political moments. This is a guy, after all, who made an unintentionally hilarious campaign ad of himself as “Top Gov.” DeSantis knows that a hurricane is best understood as a spinning whirl of photo opps. There is a playbook for this in Florida: you put on jeans and a windbreaker and throw your shoulders back and lift your chin and take on that commander-in-chief vibe. You send helicopters in to rescue people and talk about the heartbreak of what you are seeing and how you will do whatever it takes to rebuild from the wreckage. For a politician like DeSantis, it’s a good a chance as he’ll ever get to show his manly Republican-ness, to flaunt his un-woke-ness, and to show how down-in-the-debris with the people he is. DeSantis got a little off-script when he was spotted prancing around inwhite rubber bootsthat made him look like Princess Lea, but that only made him more determined to scowl at the media and double-down on playing the storm stud.
Hurricane Ian was a hugely damaging and deadly storm. A full accounting of the destruction won’t emerge for months, but right now, the 102 people dead, $40 billion in damages. It’s the most deadly hurricane to hit Florida since1935.
But what is particularly tragic is that Ian hit at the moment when it is becoming blindingly clear to anyone who cares to look that the climate crisis is not only here now, but it is profoundly changing our world in real-time. You can see it everywhere: the wildfires out west, the heat waves in Europe and China, the floods in Pakistan that displaced 33 million people. Another big change, however, is the fact that solutions are at hand. The price of clean energy is ridiculously cheap in most parts of the world, and the economic benefits of dumping fossil fuels quickly are no longer speculative.
A DECADE AGO, AL GORE told me that everyone who cares about climate crisis has what he called an “oh shit” moment, when the scale and immensity of what we face in the climate crisis becomes obvious and prompts you to take action.
Hurricane Ian should have been Florida’s “oh shit” moment. Instead, it is likely to be just another opportunity for roofing contractors to swindle desperate people and new condos to get built on barrier islands. The wreckage has not even been cleared yet, but the legacy of the storm is already clear. There is zero evidence that DeSantis or anyone else in the Florida political power structure is thinking differently about what to do in the aftermath of this storm. To them, the Florida coast is just a big bowling alley. The rebuild is just a way of re-racking of the pins until the next hurricane comes along and blows it all down again.
Just to be clear: Hurricane Ian was not a “natural” disaster. Yes, hurricanes have been hitting the Gulf Coast for tens of thousands of years. But what made Ian so the devastating was two factors, both of which are entirely human-made.
First, we have supercharged hurricanes by burning fossil fuels and dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the air, which heats up the atmosphere — and, critically, the ocean. Hurricanes are heat engines — a hotter world means bigger, more intense, and more rapidly intensifying storms. Rising seas also add to the risk by making storm surges higher and more powerful.
Second, whatStephen Strader, an associate professor at Villanova who studies severe weather hazard exposure, calls “the expanding bull’s eye effect” of hurricane damage. According to Strader,Florida’s population hasgrown nearly 60%since Hurricane Andrew crashed into the state in 1992, which is two times faster than the national average over that same time period. The number of homes in Florida has nearly doubled from 5.7 million in 1990 to10 million in 2020.
The consequences of all this: bigger, stronger, wetter storms, hitting more people and wrecking more property. Unless something changes, that arc of destruction will only grow.
What’s the solution? Quit burning fossil fuels, for starters. The Inflation Reduction Act (AKA climate bill), which Biden signed into law this summer, will be massive accelerant of the clean energy transition. But it needs to go even faster. Getting off fossil fuels won’t stop sea level rise – there is too much heat already built up in the ocean – but it would slow the rate of sea level rise and reduce the risk of a catastrophic collapse of ice sheets like the Doomsday Glacier in West Antarctica.
The other thing that needs to happen is climate triage. By that I mean, making strategic decisions about what can be saved and what can’t. At some point, as the seas rise and the storms get bigger and more and more the coastal areas become unlivable, somebody, somewhere will have to make hard decisions about what stays and what goes. After all, money — and political will — are not infinite. There is no evading this reckoning. The only question is, will there be a planned, equitable, incremental retreat over years, or what Florida artistXavier Cortadaonce described to me a “Mad Max response” of mayhem and panic? It’s not like we don’t know what is coming.
The first and most obvious step that needs to be taken is simply to stop rebuilding in high-risk areas.
Scientist Peter Gleicktweetedone solution:“Here is what needs to happen. Full insurance payout only with agreements NOT to rebuild here. The destroyed gets cleared & mangroves or other coastal ecosystems get restored. No new flood insurance is issued in these areas. This must be the beginning of managed retreat.”
The problem is, people don’t like being told where they can live, much less what they can do with their property. And hell if a politician like DeSantis is going to push for this. Making people pay higher insurance rates to live in high-risk places is one way encourage people to move, but higher insurance prices also has the perverse effect of discouraging people from buying it because it’s too expensive.
But the biggest problem for managed retreat is that local officials see any retreat as an erosion of their tax base. Less development equals less tax revenue, which means less money for everything from schools to storm protection. It is a vicious cycle: more development brings in more revenue, but more development also brings more risk and more potential for destruction.
So what’s likely going to happen in the aftermath of Ian is predictable: the same dumb stuff will be built in the same dumb places. Trumpers who don’t believe in government will be calling for government cash for rebuilding and then screaming when it isn’t enough. There will likely be some marginal strengthening of building codes and a few zoning tweaks. Real estate speculators will move in. A few people who have had enough will move out. And that will be about it. A full-scale introspective look at how we build on the coast and how we can begin to thoughtfully move away from it is about as likely as seeing mermaids swimming off the coast of Sanibel island.
And that will only accelerate the decline of these coastal communities. “As awareness of risk grows, the financial value of risky places drops,”writesclimate futurist Alex Steffen. “Where meeting that risk is more expensive than decision-makers think a place is worth, it simply won’t be defended. It will be unofficially abandoned. That will then create more problems. Bonds for big projects, loans and mortgages, business investment, insurance, talented workers —all will grow more scarce. Then, value will crash, a phenomenon I callthe Brittleness Bubble.”
In this sense, Hurricane Ian is yet another signal of how deeply, woefully, tragically unprepared we are for what’s coming. Perhaps the greatest danger in the climate crisis is not rising seas or more intense hurricanes, but our own moral and intellectual failure to grasp what’s happening. “We are confronted simultaneously with our vulnerability to catastrophe and our profound unseriousness in the face of it,” the Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindseywroterecently. “It’s as if the fires are starting to spread through Rome and all we can do is argue about the fiddling.”
