Storm Clouds In Florida

The three biggest names in Florida politics on the Republican side are Gov. Rick Scott, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and Sen. Marco Rubio. Yet these are not the reformers.

Indeed, just a year ago, an investigative report by the Miami Herald uncovered that under Gov. Scott, Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection allegedly banned the terms “climate change” and “global warming” from appearing on official reports. And Sen. Rubio and former Gov. Bush, who until recently were rivals for this year’s Republican nomination for president, have respectively suggested that it’s “intellectually arrogant” to think there is a scientific consensus on climate change (Bush), or that scientists have exaggerated their findings (Rubio).

But other Florida Republicans — such as Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who represents Florida’s 26th District — have sounded a different note. Rep. Curbelo, whose district includes the Everglades, Key West, and West Miami, was one of 11 Republicans in the House to sponsor a resolution last September to “study and address the causes and effects of measured changes to our global and regional climates.” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose 27th District neighbors Rep. Curbelo’s to the east and encompasses coastal Miami, including the Key Biscayne region, also signed the letter.

It’s not just South Florida’s House members who have sounded the alarm; in late January of this year, 15 mayors of South Florida cities sent a joint letter to Sen. Rubio and former Gov. Bush, both then-aspirants for the Republican nomination, urging them to address the challenges posed by global warming. CNN’s Jake Tapper, who moderated the GOP debate that took place in Miami earlier this month, used Republican Miami Mayor (and Rubio supporter) Tomas Regalado’s op-ed, which was published the day before the debate, to introduce climate change into the discussion. At the debate, Sen. Rubio demurred from Mayor Regalado’s assessment, prompting Philip Levine, the mayor of Miami Beach, to say that the Florida senator was “100 percent using the language of a climate change denier.”

Mayor Levine was profiled in a New Yorker article from last December called “The Siege of Miami.” In it, Elizabeth Kolbert documents the effects that rising temperatures are already having in parts of South Florida. Far from representing a distant threat, Kolbert’s report argues that the flooding problems currently being endured by South Florida — Miami Beach in particular — are harbingers of a new Atlantis. Rep. Curbelo approvingly tweeted the article to his followers.

Reports like Kolbert’s, and this one from National Geographic, help explain the environmental and concomitant economic threats that Florida may face due to global warming.

Yet this does not tell us whether the public has taken notice. The question remains: Which group is out of step with Floridians on this issue — the South Florida mayors and House members, or the nationally known Republican bigwigs?

When we look at the polling done on the issue of climate change, the numbers can vary widely. This is because a lot rides on what question is asked.

The University of Texas at Austin conducts an Energy Poll twice every year, and this past fall they found that 59 percent of Republicans, nationally, believe that climate change is occurring. A separate survey done by the University of Michigan found that 56 percent of Republicans believe there is solid evidence of global warming.

A recent Gallup poll records an increase in Republican concern over climate change, from 31 percent in 2015 to 40 percent this year. Yet the numbers are far lower than in the surveys conducted by the two universities — Why? Gallup asked respondents to record whether they are “worried a great deal” or “worried a fair amount” about global warming. In doing so, they introduced an intensifier into their methodology: Gallup doesn’t just ask whether the climate is changing, but whether the fact that it’s changing is deeply disconcerting to those who are polled.

Beyond the scientific question of whether climate change is occurring, and how important it is as an issue, there’s the question of whether to pursue solutions through government intervention. A Monmouth University poll from earlier this year finds that 47 percent of Republicans support government action.

Shifting our focus to Hispanics — who make up 70 percent of Miami’s population, yet only 23 percent of the state’s population — we find that, according to a New York Times and Stanford University poll conducted last year, they are far more likely to care about climate change than Non-Hispanic whites. The poll found that 54 percent of Hispanics see global warming as very or extremely important, while only 37 percent of whites feel the same.

Perhaps this explains why Rep. Curbelo, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, and a number of South Florida mayors see combating climate change as an issue worth taking a stand on.

Yet what’s interesting is that in polls measuring the relative importance of global warming to Floridians, the issue fares poorly in comparison to others. Most startlingly, the low numbers do not vary across geography: Miami-Dade County voters prioritize it at the same low rate as Floridians. In a Washington Post/Univision poll utilizing findings from the Miami-based pollster Bendixen and Amandi released just this month, only 1 percent of respondents — made up of likely Republican voters in Florida’s primary — see climate change as the most important issue in this year’s presidential race (compare with jobs/economy at 43 percent, terrorism at 27 percent, healthcare at 7 percent, and education at 2 percent). Miami-Dade County residents, according to a Miami Herald poll conducted last year, were no different, seeing “climate change and sea level rise” as far less important (2 percent) than issues such as high property taxes (7 percent), government corruption (13 percent), traffic congestion (18 percent), and jobs and the economy (23 percent).

But it’s important to note that these results merely indicate that the climate isn’t the top priority of Florida’s Republican voters; when it comes to ascertaining whether Floridians think climate change is occurring and whether the government should do something about it, the numbers seem clear: Two-thirds of Floridians “believe the state should impose stricter environmental regulations.” I spoke by email to Sheril Kirshenbaum, the director of the UT Energy Poll, cited above, in order to get Florida-specific numbers. She told me that 81 percent of Floridians think that climate change is occurring, while only 9 percent say its not occurring and 10 percent don’t know. When they began asking this question in March of 2012, the numbers were: 63 percent said it’s occurring, 26 percent said it is not occurring, and 11 percent didn’t know.

As Florida Republicans with national profiles, it’s understandable, from a political perspective, why Sen. Rubio and former Gov. Bush would downplay the effects of climate change. Until recently, they were angling for a position in government — the president of the United States — for whom Florida is but one of 50 states (albeit an important one). As the Gallup poll cited above indicates, only 40 percent of Republicans nationally are greatly concerned by climate change.

This question of Florida vs. the rest of the country is interesting because it’s not clear whether these South Florida Republicans are seeking a wholesale shift in the party’s stance on global warming or whether they’re merely pushing for recognition that certain regions, Florida included, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, or whether they are simply responding to the concerns of their particular constituents. For example, is Rep. Curbelo looking for the GOP to embrace climate change as a potential threat to all Americans or would it be enough for the party to see it as a problem localized to certain coastal regions most impacted by rising sea levels?

Curbelo seems to be taking the wider-lens approach, going beyond simply seeing it as a threat to Florida. On the day of the Florida primary earlier this month, Curbelo spoke to Citizens’ Climate Lobby, stating, “we have a moral obligation to the planet,” equating ignoring our “debt to the environment” with “ignoring our country’s national debt.” These statements imply that global warming is a problem for the planet and for America, not just for Florida.

In various op-eds and interviews, the first-term congressman has called for a bipartisan approach to combating climate change. Last month, he founded, along with fellow Florida Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat, the Climate Solutions Caucus in the House of Representatives. Curbelo has said that “there shouldn’t be this false orthodoxy, where if you’re a Democrat you want to solve this problem and if you’re a Republican you want to ignore it.”

I spoke on the phone to Jessica Fernandez, President of the Miami Young Republicans, about the new environmental reality that Miami finds itself in. In the past year, her group has held two events on environmental issues alone. She told me she would more readily support a Republican who affirms the need for market-based solutions on climate change over a candidate who sees no need to act at all. A carbon tax, for example, would be preferable to the top-down EPA mandates that Democrats favor.

The question is: Will South Florida Republicans be able to generate greater party acceptability for this issue? There does seem to be some evidence that a tide is turning.

Berny Belvedere is a professor of philosophy and a writer based in Miami.