Ron DeSantis Is a Little Bit Woke on Climate Change

to the state's environment up to a point. He's pledged billions to clean up and restore Florida's everglades, which, among other benefits, will help lower the state's carbon footprint and potentially combat some of the effects of global warming. But you'll never were here, Rhonda Santis, boasting about that part of it. 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, we're not doing any left wing stuff. What we're doing, though, is just reacting to the fact that we're a flood prone state. As a Republican looking to lure away Donald Trump's voters with promises to attack woke policies, he opposes restrictions on fossil fuels and often plays down the environmental benefits of his own policies. You know, Rhonda Santis uses certain ways of communicating what he's doing that don't run a foul of what Republicans really don't

like to talk about, which is climate change. That's National reporter Michael Smith in Miami. He's written a new story for Bloomberg Green about the delicate line to Santis is walking between protecting Florida's natural resources and alienating Republican primary voters he hopes will carry him to the White House. The Santus has been quite vocal, and he's also delivered quite a bit of money from the federal government and

from the state government to preserve the Everglades. There's a massive federal project to basically refilled the swamp, ironically enough, because it's a critical thing that needs to be done to combat all these problems that South Florida has with water and also all these problems that are related to climate change. And this started when he first became governor five years ago, and now he's into a second term

and he's sort of doubled down on that. And this is really important because it basically fixes a lot of things that were broken in the creation of what is the Florida we know today over a century ago. In order to build Miami, Palm Beach, all these cities in southern Florida, you had to deal with the Everglades because the Everglades went from the middle of Florida all the way down to the ocean, and of course that means all the land where we are now living and working

in South Florida was a swamp. And so to make way for all this development of what is now a megaplex about nine million people, they had to basically drain the swamp and build all these waterworks so that the water that was going south went west and east through all these canals and stuff. And that created all the land that we now call Miami. And so that has been tremendously harmful to the environment, and we're paying the

price for that now with a climate change added. So the only way to fix that, to reverse the damage caused by humans inhabiting Florida, is to restore the traditional and natural flow of water across the Everglades again. And to do that you have to eliminate roads that are

blocking the water flow. Across this giant river of grass, and also building this mega reservoir the size of Manhattan, which will basically hold water that has been polluted for decades by sugar farming and other farming activities in the Everglades and release that water slowly across marshes the cover even more territory that are filled with plants that actually clean the water and get all the contaminants out of it so that it can be released and just flow

naturally and flow into the aquifers and restore our drinking water in southern Florida and restore the natural beauty of the Everglades. So these are all things that he has advocated for and has gotten more money and more funding and more support than basically any governor in the past in Florida, Republican or Democrat, and that's really made a

lot of environmental is happy. Mike. But as you write, one of the interesting things is the way to sandis talks about why he's doing this, and the way he

avoids talking about why he's doing this. Yeah. So another interesting aspect of this contrarian view of the environment for Republican is that Rhnda Santis uses certain ways of communicating what he's doing that don't run a foul of what Republicans really don't like to talk about, which is climate change, human beings being responsible for all this too much carbon, too much fossil fuels. He really tries to avoid that kind of language, but he says it in different ways.

For example, he talks about the need to restore the Everglades as an issue of saving and protecting water quality in Florida, and he talks about it in an economic sense. For example, if you talk to the Biden administration about the Everglades, they're going to say, we have to fix

it because it's an amazing natural sequester of carbon. It will reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which is true, and it will also offset a lot of other impacts of rising sea levels and climate chaftc DESANDUS

is never going to say it that way. What he says is Florida's economy is utterly dependent on tourism and real estate, and nobody wants to pay a lot of money for real estate if your beach is covered with algae and red tide and horrible things like that, or flooded, and no tourists want to come to Florida if you don't have a nice beach and nice water and nice marshes if you want to go fishing, etc. So he

frames the whole debate in that sense. It's a water quality issue and it's an issue for protecting the natural beaut of Florida that is the anchor, the lynchpin of our economy. But he doesn't say climate change, and why specifically would Descantis want to avoid saying, Hey, I'm also

helping the environment. This support of the environment, in his way contradicts with a couple of foundational aspects of a lot of his other policies, because the critical driver of what Ronda Santis has done in Florida and what he's proposing for the rest of America. He calls it a blueprint for America, which almost everyone interprets as his intention to run for president, try to get the Republican nomination

in twenty twenty four. His whole platform is really based on cultural issues, and that includes what we call esg environmental social government investing policies, which he views as another symptom of the imposition of woke ideas on America. Subject of today is tackling this issue of esg. I don't know where this stuff comes from, but these elites grab it and they really want to impose it on the rest of us. I think what it's devolved into is

a mechanism to inject political ideology. He's really gone on the attack mode against any form of telling companies how they can invest their money and trying to restrict investments that contribute to climate change, or trying to oppose any limits on fossil fuels because of climate change. So he is a strident opponent of doing business with banks that are not lending to fossil fuels, of allowing municipalities to pass their own laws trying to limit fossil fuels, anything

like that. He says he doesn't believe in the reduction of carbon and the environment as something that's really necessary or something that should be mandated. So he loves the Everglades, he loves water quality, he loves resilience, which means doing things to combat climate change the effects of climate change

in a state like Florida. But he draws the line at any limits on the use of fossil fuels, and in fact, he tries to thread this needle by comparing himself to Teddy Roosevelt, another kind of tough guy president who is also a conservationist. Yeah, that's really the image that he's trying to evoke, and his handlers are really pushing that. Ronda Santis is a Teddy Roosevelt preservationist. You know,

this is the way Republicans do it. And he is bringing all those values that Teddy Roosevelt imbued to the modern era and he really frames everything that way, which means, you can save the environment, you can help the environment, but you don't have to be woke in the process, or you don't have to be a radical Democrat in the process. Here's a way the Republicans can do it without hurting business and without going to what they think

are just extremes that have no basis in fact climate change. Now, does he actually deny that climate change is real or what's his position, because I think he says his quote is I'm not a quote global warming person. In a way, it's semantics, but he does not directly deny it. I've never heard him deny it, but he does pretty much say he doesn't agree with a lot of the things

that are sort of fundamental assumptions behind climate change. At the same time, he says, yeah, you know, Florida is a state that has always been a victim of extreme weather. He doesn't give any theories as to why that's happening, but he recognizes that it's a fact. The sea rise may be because of human activity and the changing climate. Maybe it's not. I don't know. But what I do know is I see the sea rising, I see the

increased floding in South Florida. I think you'd be a fool not to consider that an issue that we need to address. His focus is got to do stuff to protect our communities from that. You know, we have to build hurricane resistance structures, we have to sometimes raise roads, etc. Etc. But he's not going to say, or at least I've never heard him say, this is all because human beings are spewing too much carbon in the atmosphere and that's causing all this, and that's what we have to really attack.

One industry he has gone after, though, uncharacteristically for a Republican,

is the state's sugar industry. That's correct, and this is a pretty incredible shift for a Florida governor or any Florida politician, because the sugar industry traditionally has been one of the most powerful lobbying force in Florida, and that is because they basically, over the last sixty seventy years have colonized huge swaths of the Everglades and turned the swamp into sugarcane plantations because they get massive federal subsidies

I support billions of dollars a year. Traditionally, they still have about four hundred thousand acres of crop in Florida's one of the biggest crops in Florida, and they've always gotten support from governors from Congress to keep getting these subsidies. But Ron de Santis has been an exception to that. Ironically in a lot of ways. When he was in Congress, he voted against those subsidies twice, which normally is political suicide for a Florida leader. Very few have done and

survived and lived to tell the tale. Initially that decision was because he was against the whole idea of corporate welfare sort of ideologically, but as governor he sort of doubled down because when he ran for governor, the sugar companies gave massive funding to his opponent in the primary in twenty eighteen to try to beat him, and he ended up winning, and since then he's not been a

friend of Sugar More. With Mike Smith after the break my gime, your story, you write that water actually isn't the only thing that Ron de Santis is doing that could fall under environmentalism, even though he doesn't talk about it and he doesn't want to call it that. Yeah, that's true. A lot of it is like what he

calls water quality improvements. In his first term, he says he came up with one point six billion dollars worth of funding for water quality improvements, and that's everything from actually cleaning up polluted waterways and coastal waterways, finding ways to combat red tide and algae blooms, and also replacing leaky septic tanks because in Florida, one of the major causes of contamination of water supplies because so many people

have septic tanks. For example, in Miami, I think there's over one hundred thousand homes that have septic tanks in the city of Miami where I live. My house has a septic tank. There's no sewer lines. It's crazy, and so a lot of those are leaking and they need to be replaced. So he's been getting a lot of

money for that is critically important. He's also done quite a bit for wildlife corridors, which are basically ways to restore wilderness so that animals like Florida panthers, the few that are left, can get across highways and not be hit by cars. So these are examples of the kind of things that he's been doing, in addition to record

amounts of money for Everglades restorations. For example, in his first term he actually secured one point seven billion dollars for this project, and he's committed to I think another two point five or three point five billion dollars in his second term for Everglades and water quality improvements. Be on water though, Descantist hasn't really leaned into conservation or fossil fuel reduction, has he. I mean, take solar. There's a lot of sun in Florida, but he doesn't really

talk about that, does he. He hasn't been a fierce promoter of solar energy in Florida, and he hasn't come up with massive incentive programs, and a lot of people say he hasn't even taken advantage of basically the free money that's out there under Biden's infrastructure plan that Florida

could benefit from a lot. For example, there was a refer twenty eighteen here in Florida where voters massively supported and passed a referendum that would allow you put solar panels on your house and require the power company to buy the power you don't use, because that's not the

way the law is now. That passed, and then the power utilities sort of quietly cut a deal and got some legislation passed in the legislature that would not require them to buy back your electricity, and that was hugely controversial. Desanis was pretty quiet on it until he saw helps that people were getting voters that he vetoed that bill,

so you know, when push comes to shove. He's been a supporter solar, but he's not an an avid advocate, and he's also done things and this is why, for example, the Cira Club gives him a D minus on their scorecard of raiding governors and other politicians on the environment. They say that one of the biggest problems is that he has blocked local governments from doing stuff on their

own that address climate change. For example, municipalities that want to restrict the use of fossil fuels and heating and cooling buildings, you know, to require solar panels and that sort of thing. He's blocked localities from doing that. Key West and wanted to ban cruise ships from docking because it's destroying the coral reefs. It's disrupting the marine ecosystem, and he blocked them from being able to do that.

So these are the kind of things that he supports some things, but others he doesn't, and that's what gets him in trouble with some of the environmental groups. Producer Moe Barrow spoke with Don Sheriffs. She's Florida director of the Environmental Defense Funding. Here's what she had to say about DeSantis's environmental policies. So, I think it's it's a mixed bag. I think a lot of folks were relieved after the last governor really wouldn't even knowledge the existence

of climate change. To see the opportunity that we could have with Governor de Santis. There's been significant investment in Everglades restoration. It is not easy politically to stand up against big sugar or big utilities. We need to recognize that those are complicated measures. And I think that's been done fairly, fearlessly. It's extremely unfortunate that the terminology around climate change has become so politically polarized. Everybody loses when

we participate in that. We'll be right back. Mike has de Santis himself taken any heat from other Republicans for being at least a little bit you woke on the environment. Yeah, interestingly enough, he at least not that I've heard of. I really haven't seen any other Republicans complaining about what he's doing. I think because he he's been very effective at maintaining that delicate balance. I'm an environmentalist like Teddy Roosevelt,

but I'm not a climate change lackey. You know, I'm not going to fall for that woke a view of we humans are the cause of it because we liked driving cars that run on gasoline. But you're writing your story. He's been very effective and actually raising a lot of money from people you wouldn't expect to give money to

run to Sanvis. That's correct. You know, we looked at his campaign contribution records since he became governor, and we were able to identify three million dollars in contributions just from people who were members of a couple of environmental groups in Florida, mainly the Everglades Foundation. These are people who care deeply about the environment. It's like their main issue. It is their number one issue for evaluating a politician

and deciding when to give money. And I spoke with a couple, for example, hedge fund investor Paul Tudor Jones, and he told me this is my issue, Everglades, and that's why supporting Ron to Santis, And it's quite interesting because the governor's fundraisers tell me that this is actually a way they've been able to capture monetary and political support from moderate Republicans who do care deeply about the environment and are searching for a Republican who they can

feel comfortable about supporting for the environmental policy. So to Santis, so far, it's been quite effective. And if he does run for president, this will be another way that he can raise money and garner support, maybe from voters that might not otherwise support. This could be the issue that brings him over to his side. This money that he's raised on his environmental record is really planning the seed, if you will, for a funding push, he would need

to do to run for president. It was very successful during his reelection campaign for governor. Like it was a national flow of money that was anchored by environmental policy in a way that was a pretty important litmas test as to whether that kind of rategy would work on a national level. The effectiveness of the limited amount of environmental fundraising, if you will, that he did in his reelection for governor tells the fundraisers that there's a lot

more potential if you broaden it out to a national campaign. Mike, you've been watching de Santis and his rise in national Republican politics. Do you think this is a winning formula for him, especially among Trump primary voters. Governor de Santis is walking a risky and fine line in a way

when it comes to the environment. He has to be extremely careful that he doesn't come off as sort of a Democrat climate change advocate and believer and enemy of big oil people who don't agree with ESG investment strategies.

But at the same time, he has to make people in Florida happy and do whatever he can to keep the state from becoming hideously polluted by algae or red tide, all these things, or to see the quality of water go down drastically and really have a crisis to deal with, which are all things that are being exacerbated by climate change. But it's hard for him to say that while not upsetting the rest of his space. Mike Smith, thanks so much for coming on the show, My Pleasure, Thanks for

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