Florida Power and Light, for shame by gimleteye

Every single component of Florida’s destructive growth machine is on view in the struggle by FPL and citizens whether or not to build a new coal fired power plant at the edge of the dying Lake Okeechobee in Glades County.

It is a demonstration project: how the economic elite team up with local mainstream media to perpetuate false Chamber of Commerce values—that all expanded tax base is good and when it is bigger, better.

The liar’s miracle of expanded tax base has turned Florida into an old painted whore who can still pass for pretty in certain rural communities that are desperate to be like the big city.

Oh yes, we can already hear the howling complaints: "we just want jobs for our children".

One step at a time, drained aquifers, degraded springs, choked infrastructure, burning fires surrounding islands of the natural world defended as arks by environmentalists, all ringed by a polluted coastline: this is the frame for "jobs for our children".
Damn if you don’t need a Hazmat suit just to protect yourself from news stories like this one, from the Glades County Democrat.

“A group of local citizens has organized in support of a power plant. Citizens Power Coalition is a local organization made up of residents from Glades and Hendry counties who are pushing to help FPL’s proposal to build a power plant near Moore Haven. The group organized about six months ago when some residents began to feel that the power plant would be a positive beginning for the inevitable growth of rural Glades County.”

What the Glades County Democrat doesn’t say is that the citizens group is organized by the Miami public relations firm, Wragg and Casas, funded by Florida Power and Light.

In a letter to the editor, Rhonda Roff—an indomitable foe of the power plant—writes, “Knowing that the Power Coalition is funded by FPL and orchestrated by Wragg and Casas, the public relations firm that has done more harm to the Everglades than any other, I cannot understand what Nena Bolan (the writer) was thinking, or why her editors did not see this failure to understand the English language!”

Indeed, Wragg and Casas is the spin machine for the sugar industry.

The sugar industry itches for zoning and permitting to build suburban tract housing in the Everglades Agricultural Area. Its dominance of the mechanics of water management in Florida assured that Lake Okeechobee would turn into a cesspit, that Florida’s estuaries would be ruined on not one but two coasts, and that drinking water for millions of South Floridians would depend on a system designed to optimized sugar production but leave rate payers vulnerable to drought.

Whenever the status quo of water management in South Florida is called into question, Wragg and Casas arrive like the fire brigade—whether it is pressuring US Senators to preserve the vast profitability of the Farm Bill, or, turning out middle schoolers or church go’ers, or, persuading county commissions to let a little sun shine into its plans for suburbia in the Everglades—Wragg and Casas is walking point.

The Glades County Democrat reports on opposition by “environmental activists” like Rhonda Roff but spins the article like a Wragg and Casas press release: “… there are some, including the parents in Glades County who do not want their children to leave the area in search of jobs…” and “many people support the project… because of the estimated $21 million in annual tax benefits to Glades county and several million for Hendry county.”

Wragg and Casas is just doing its job.

In Miami, Joanna Wragg was a senior editor of the Knight Ridder Miami Herald and mightily contributed to the Big Sugar aura as an immoveable placeholder in the Everglades.

Additionally, sugar’s retainers with virtually every big downtown law firm in Miami assured no criticism of sugar would ever leak out of Florida’s largest county to Tallahassee, or, to Washington.

Rhonda Roff’s letter to the editor “outs” the fake citizens group, calling it an example of “astroturfing”: “The goal of (astroturfing) is to disguise the agenda of a client as an independent public reaction to some political entity.” Indeed.

Cooked coral reefs, dead hooded Arctic seal in a Florida waterway, disappearing bees, drought, fire—with carbon dioxide levels approaching levels not seen for 600,000 years and racing higher, what Florida needs is a tough conservation program that pushes the electric utilities into line, with clear incentives based on reducing energy—and not investment in a single new coal-fired power plant, no matter how “clean”.

We would like to think that the world is capable of adjusting to the threats of global warming, but if the Miami-Dade county commission won’t whisper a word about reconciling development patterns with a serious drought, and if Glades county elected officials are determined to sell its citizens the same Chamber of Commerce version of liar’s poker that has pummeled Florida—what hope is there for the future?

It is a shame: Florida Power and Light understands perfectly well the nature of the challenge to humanity, by global warming. One of its divisions is the largest producer of wind energy in the nation. The company is staffed by engineers and experts who can parse the difference in regulatory policies in every state in the nation.

What it is doing in Glades county is simply pushing its own corporate agenda—shareholder profits—to the edge of what is practical, including the same spin machinery that has had a devastating impact on Florida.

It is hard to reach any other conclusion: the way Florida Power and Light is slamming its coal-fired power plant into Glades County, Florida, is a frightful indicator that society will not curb greed and avarice in time to beat back the impacts of global warming.