The viral video shows angry Floridians shouting at "Red Tide Rick" as he scurries out the back door of a restaurant into his armored SUV, hoping to deny an unscripted media moment when his rapidly declining popularity is revealed.
For eight years as governor, Scott was obsessed with preventing such unscripted moments. Every photo op with Scott seemed airbrushed as a Clairol commercial.
At the same time, Scott helped erode protections for Florida's waters, cutting hundreds of millions from agencies and stifling law enforcement against polluters. With Florida's waters filling with toxins that can lead to severe neurological disease -- as in Alzheimer's -- , Rick Scott can't hide.
Scott can't hide the fact that he caused state environmental protection to dissolve at the same time his lawyers argued in federal court that the state can do whatever it wants, even if it means condemning natural resources like the Everglades to a long and tortured death.
The pro-Tea Party, anti-regulatory agendas were cynically organized to mesh with the needs of his big campaign contributors -- from the state's agricultural polluters, like Big Sugar, to the political action committees where big business mingled millions in contributions to funnel to its mostly Republican stars.
Florida environmentalists have been crying for the “precautionary principle” — first, do no harm — for decades. No one in political office listened, not Democrats or Republicans, because that's not how polluters make money. Wherever in state law the precautionary principle pops up, the polluters do their best to lop its head off.
The toxic waters in Palm Beach and Martin Counties, and Lee and Collier, are killing pets and threatening people. In the Scott early years, public health officials downplayed or ignored the threats because it cost money and angered polluters when public attention was shifted to the sorry state of Florida waters. Kind of like the clusters of rare pediatric cancer the Scott administration has ignored.
Telling these stories around a dinner table recently, a friend told me about a wedding he attended last year in Naples where the entire party had to move to the hotel indoors. Outside by the water and the sunset, people began coughing and wheezing because of the air drifting over the fouled waters.
There are going to be a lot fewer weddings in Naples because of Rick Scott.
There is evidence that breathing around some of Florida's toxic waters can expose people to brain disease. With warming temperatures, (note Scott’s ultimatum to state agencies to eliminate “global warming” from state communications), and no changes to the way Florida manages growth and industrial agriculture, this year's red tides could turn from chronic to permanent in certain waters.
And Rick Scott wants your vote to be next US Senator from Florida? Read this scathing OPED from the Palm Beach Post:
Editorial: Scott must answer for environmental malpractice
OPINION By The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board
Posted: 7:28 a.m. Sunday, September 16, 2018
With a horrific red tide killing marine life and tourism on Florida’s southwest coast, and with toxic green algae bringing misery to the Treasure Coast and Fort Myers area on a now-annual basis, it’s understandable that Gov. Rick Scott would want to run away from his environmental record.
Voters shouldn’t let him.
From the moment the health-care multimillionaire swept into office on 2010’s Tea Party anti-tax, anti-regulation wave, he began slashing the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), cutting budgets, skilled staff and inspections.
The SFWMD, which had a $1.4 billion budget in 2007, is now an $814 millionagency. Scott’s administration cut $700 million out of all the state’s water management districts after his first year and crippled their ability to levy taxes. His justification — giving average property owners tax relief — is a sick joke; the state’s 15 biggest industries, like Florida Power & Light and the Walt Disney Co., got to pocket a combined $1.2 million annually, but homeowners save less than $3 per $100,000.
What got slashed? The state’s network for water monitoring shrank from 350 monitoring sites to 115, according to Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center. Enforcement of anti-pollution regulations slowed to a crawl. The DEP pursued almost 1,600 enforcement cases in 2010, but a mere 220 in 2017, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
In 2012, Scott repealed a law requiring septic-tank inspections. Now, only 1 percent of Florida’s 2.6 million septic tanks get inspected, and scientists say that pollution from leaking septic tanks adds fuel to toxic algae blooms.
The result: nitrogen and phosphorus loads are on the rise in Lake Okeechobee. Combined with agricultural run-off, this is the root of the toxic blue-green algae — and almost certainly a contributor to the unusual endurance of the red tide, the worst of which is occurring near Fort Myers at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, one of the exit points of Lake O’s waters.
Yet Scott is trying to fool voters into thinking that Sen. Bill Nelson, the Democrat whom Scott is trying to unseat on Nov. 6, is to blame for the algae blooms. A Scott ad released Friday contends Nelson has done “nothing” for “Lake O.” It’s supposedly Nelson’s fault that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t limited water discharges or fixed the Herbert Hoover Dike.
This is nonsensical double-talk. The dike’s condition and the rate of discharges have nothing to do with the pollutants in the water in Lake Okeechobee. Letting all that phosphorus and nitrogen into the water to begin with — that’s the problem. And that’s on Scott.
The same Scott, by the way, who didn’t buy an available 153,200 acres of U.S. Sugar land, which would have given that water someplace else to go. Backing off that deal, in 2015, was a blow to Everglades restoration.
Sign up for The Palm Beach Post weekly Opinion newsletter: Text Opinion to 444999
The list goes on. In 2011, Scott abolished the Department of Community Affairs, which protected the state from bad development and gave the environment a vote in land-use decisions. He slashed funding for land conservation under the Forever Florida program, and later joined enthusiastically in the Florida Legislature’s nickel-and-diming of Amendment 1, the wildly popular ballot measure that is supposed to be generating hundreds of millions of dollars each year for environmental protection.
Most egregiously, the governor of the state most endangered by sea-level rise allegedly barred the very mention of climate change (although the climate denier denies that, too).
In sum, Scott “has regularly put the wishes of corporate polluters above the needs of Florida’s environment and families,” states Kevin Curtis, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Coalition Action Fund.
“He’s sided with a fringe group of climate change deniers, defunded popular and bipartisan conservation programs, and undermined the enforcement of air, water and climate protections.”
This governor should not escape judgment for these past eight years. And any Floridian who cares about the environment — or simply gags from the stench of the algae blooms — should demand answers for such a putrid environmental record.
Any Floridian who cares about the environment — or simply gags from the stench of the algae blooms — should remember who has been in charge.
No comments:
Post a Comment