Miami should tell climate change denier on FIU panel: Fuck You ... by gimleteye

I'm old school when it comes to flaming others on the internet. Don't like it. Try not to do it. But FIU's inclusion on a climate change panel of a well-known industry funded denier is a bridge too far. The Miami Herald reported last week:

James Taylor — no, not the singer — is the man to call when you want an official-sounding, educated voice on why climate change isn’t happening (it is), why humans haven’t caused it (we have) or why it’s actually good for the planet (it isn’t). It’s all but impossible to find a reputable climate scientist that agrees with Taylor but his views are popular with the fossil fuel industry and climate-change deniers. He’s a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, which is notorious for a series of 2012 billboards in Chicago with the phrase “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” alongside pictures of The Unabomber, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden. Heartland was at one point funded by oil and gas giants, including Exxon Mobil. So why is he speaking in Miami Beach next week at a workshop to teach journalists and editors about covering climate change? “It’s like having a debate on gun control and not inviting the NRA,” said Alejandro Alvarado, an associate professor at Florida International University and co-organizer of the event. “The key word here is workshop. This is not a science forum. It is a workshop.”

 Polluters and industry-sponsored hacks are the only ones promoting the false equivalency "workshop" and talk about whether climate change is real or not. Trump's EPA chief Scott Pruitt had to back away from his plan to offer the nation its own "workshop" on climate change and global warming. The president's pollsters suggested it was a bad time to be picking a fight on global warming, especially when Pruitt is making so much disgusting headway in deforming the mission of the agency. From Inside Climate News:

Over the past 13 months, Pruitt's EPA has taken at least 15 major actions on air pollution—all to delay, weaken or repeal protections, and all opposed by the American Lung Association and other health groups—according to an analysis by the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). The list includes the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's signature initiative to address climate change, which also would dramatically reduce smog, particulate matter, mercury and other dangerous air pollutants by slashing the amount of coal the country burns.

The point is that FIU's inclusion of a leading climate change denier is adding fuel and energy to a debate that has not only been settled by science; municipalities and counties in Florida are rapidly moving to invest tax dollars in physical infrastructure, like Miami Beach's $500 million sewer and pump upgrades, to deal with rapidly rising sea levels. Think about it. It was less than a decade ago that the Miami Herald belatedly agreed, within its executive and publisher rank, that climate change and global warming did not require the "balance" that industry groups and trade associations and leading lights and lobbyists had imposed in the public sphere.

How much more nonsense from Alt R can America stand?

We are not going back to the time when denialism could be supported because, sadly, the facts on the ground are piling up with more and more evidence that the most conservative estimates of scientists, only a few years ago, were far too conservative. Climate change is accelerating with the force, yes, of a hurricane.

I know this is still not a view embraced by the general public. Yesterday, on a fine Spring day, I walked the beach at Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne. The sand was packed with Miami families enjoying the cool (for Miami) weather and warm, clear waters. I wondered how many of the thousands had sea level rise on their minds. How many were worried about the real impacts of climate change on their children covering themselves in sand or joyously hauling buckets of water to help build castles near the tide line.

Waging the false equivalency debate on global warming bought time for polluters and lobbyists; time to mint billions while the window to create effective change at the policy level slowly closes.

The World Bank, last week, issued a report estimating that 140 million refugees from global warming could be on the move by the year 2050. Like other predictions, the number could be wildly conservative.

A stable climate is like a perfectly spinning top. Man-made, forced climate change has knocked the spinning top into dis-equilibrium. Literally, decade by decade, the wobbling is increasing more and more wildly. A few days ago, in mid- March at base level, rain fell in the Utah's Wasatch Range. Thirty years ago, when I first experienced this region of the Rockies, winter rainfall was unthinkable. It didn't happen all of a sudden. Over the decades, the winter snowfall in the Wasatch -- once the lowest moisture content in North America -- has loaded up with moisture: consistent with rapid global warming.

Some doubters chime: this winter has been cold in the northeast! New York City experienced the most snowfall in 100 years! Science Magazine addresses that phenomenon in a recent report: "The Chill of a Warming World":

Why have some winters been so cold in some of the northern midlatitudes, even though global climate is getting hotter? Paradoxically, the answer may be that the Arctic itself is warming so quickly. Cohen et al. show that there is a clear relationship between Arctic temperatures and severe winter weather for the United States over the past two decades and that severe winter weather in the eastern United States has become more frequent as Arctic temperatures have risen. Although they were not included in the analysis, this relationship is likely valid for northern Europe and East Asia as well.

Common sense tells us what happens in a warming world, in places like the northeast where abnormally cold weather alternates with freakishly warm spells. As the ice melts, the warm spurts grow longer. The short fluxes of cold grow shorter. This trend persists until the arctic ice melts entirely; a course that science predicts could happen in the arctic north by the end of the century.

The extinction of species, as this transition occurs rather quietly, will gather to a quiet, devastating hurricane. There is no guarantee, none, that we won't be part of that movement. As sea levels rise, coastal cities will toxify. Inland, as hundreds of millions of climate refugees are forced to move to higher ground, there will be a fierce battle to protect scarce resources and food supply.

This is the future we can read in the grim days of oligarchs hardening their bunkers against common sense. It is unconscionable for FIU to lend any credence to their discredited nonsense.

See what Big Sugar really looks like ... by gimleteye

Sugar silo 2013, Zineb Sedira

Take a look. Look at the photos. As seasons cycle, this is what the Big Sugar outcome looks like.

Take a good look: your Everglades, your waterfronts, fishing and swimming, your waterways, your tourism-based jobs, your county and your state are all sacrifice zones to giant piles of sugar like this.

What is good for sugar -- and billionaires supported by subsidies in the US Farm Bill -- is manifestly bad for you.

Sugar is always the 3rd rail in Florida politics. Its public relations and political machinery meshes government with lobbying and marketing budgets. Just like Big Tobacco spent decades telling consumers smoking was benign and did not cause cancer.

Dark sugar money pools everywhere elected officials scramble for campaign cash. To that rule there are exceptions, but there are no exceptions to its domination of water management in Florida. Big Sugar gets water on its own terms.

When it rains too much and Lake Okeechobee rises too high, billions of gallons of polluted water are dumped to tide, covering what you value with dangerous scum. These impacts could be fixed if the industry cleaned up its irrigation runoff on its own lands, but it uses public lands -- lands you paid for! -- instead.

It is very real. Big Sugar is toxic to your health, to your waterfront properties, to your waterways clogged with fertilizer byproducts including methylmercury and cyanobacteria, to every rule and regulation to protect your health and your environment including the St. Lucie, the Caloosahatchee, the Everglades and tribal lands of the Miccosukee and Seminole.

When consumed in excess, sugar is toxic. In laboratory experiments, rats prefer sugar to cocaine. According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report, a trillion dollars per year is attributable to over-consumption of sugar in the American diet.


What you value would be protected if "once and for all" the state and federal governments created enough polishing marshes for Big Sugar's pollution, stopping the industry from using the Everglades, Florida Bay, your waterways and property as its sacrifice zones. It could happen if Gov. Rick Scott and Senate President Joe Negron intervene now to fix what went wrong in last year's legislation: poison pills that pin the state to Big Sugar's outcome. The Treasure Coast Palm's Eve Samples recently wrote:

(In 2011) ... Scott forced $700 million in cuts to the state’s water management districts — including the South Florida Water Management District, the lead state agency on Everglades restoration. And during his first six years as governor, he gutted staffing at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The agency lost more than 600 employees, dropping from about 3,500 to 2,900, according to reporting by Craig Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times.

About the Everglades: Scott has touted an Everglades restoration bill he signed in 2013 — but doesn't talk about how it phased out a tax farmers pay to grow crops in the Everglades Agricultural Area, leaving taxpayers on the hook for any lingering pollution costs. Also in 2013, Scott and the Legislature approved 30-year, no-bid leases for farmers in the EAA, including sugar giant Florida Crystals.

The same year, Scott was among the politicians who took secret trips to U.S. Sugar’s private hunting lodge at King Ranch in Texas. After the trip, Scott appointed a King Ranch executive, Mitch Hutchcraft, to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District. By the way, U.S. Sugar Corp. donated $960,000 to Scott's political committee Let's Get to Work between 2014 and 2016.

We can offer mild praise for Scott's support of state Senate President Joe Negron's efforts to build an Everglades reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee — but he's been far from bold on the issue. And bold action is what's needed for a true fix.

The bottom line: less for you, more for them. A lot more because what Big Sugar really wants is to farm tract housing when it becomes more profitable than farming sugarcane and to sell you rainwater that falls on their fields when there is not enough in city reservoirs.

That is the bitter truth.

(Click here to watch Dr. Robert Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" viewed on YouTube more than 7.4 million times.)

What Senate President Joe Negron Should Do About The Lemon Reservoir Plan ... by gimleteye

It will cost $2 billion. It won't clean water for the Everglades and it won't protect the upstream estuaries. All the plan for a massive new reservoir will do is cement the prerogatives of the state's powerful cartel, Big Sugar.

The reservoir plan was the most important piece of work that emerged from the Florida legislature last year; an initiative at the insistence of then in-coming Senate president Joe Negron because the previous year, toxic puke from Lake Okeechobee had coated his constituents in a bath of guacamole thick algae. The lake (thank you, climate change) had risen alarmingly high in dry season. Something had to be done. Now that details are emerging, the accolades are dying too.

I don't want to get into the weeds on what the legislature passed and Gov. Scott signed into law. Basically, they agreed to create the largest man-made structure in Florida: a mini-Lake Okeechobee south of the 500,000 acres where sugarcane is grown. They want to do it on public land to clean up private industry's pollution because -- well -- that's how we roll in Florida.

What I want to focus on is Rod Tirrell.

Activist Rod Tirrell in an undated photo. (Courtesy, Matt Schwartz)

Rod was an Everglades warrior. He passed away this week, far too young, leaving behind school-age twins in Broward County. In the late 1990's Rod -- a volunteer board member of the Broward Sierra Club Group -- was part of a team of Club activist leaders struggling to come to terms with the Clinton administration and Lawton Chiles plan to save the Everglades. It was called the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and became law of the land in 2000.

Rod argued strongly that Sierra Club should NOT support the plan because it failed to include a way to store and treat enough of Big Sugar's pollution to solve the problem of dirty water contaminating the Everglades and Florida Bay. That's the same problem we face today.

Back in the mid-1990's, most mainstream environmental groups, led by Audubon, said: this is the best we are going to get. Senator Bob Graham and Floridian, then EPA administrator Carol Browner said, this is the best you are going to get. The debate raged within Sierra Club ranks for years. Sierra Club was persuaded by its allies; "Let's take this now and live to fight another day."

Rod wasn't involved with Sierra Club when last year environmentalists said the same thing in support of what emerged from the sausage grinder in Tallahassee. He never lost his love for the Everglades but drifted away from Sierra Club after its decision to support CERP in 2000.

Today, the same environmental groups are in a crisis over the Negron plan which started with best intentions and turned into a lemon.

This week, the water management district -- whose board is appointed by Gov. Rick Scott, now the undeclared Republican candidate for US Senate -- released a glossy, PR heavy "plan" in Tallahassee. It is basically for a man-made reservoir as much as 19 feet deep. Its walls will have to be thirty to forty feet high to prevent over-topping in case of hurricanes.

Although district scientists pledge it will work, remember Rod Tirrell: two decades after governmental agencies all agreed that 10 parts per billion phosphorous pollution must be achieved for the Everglades to survive, it still hasn't happened. As the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians pointed out in an acidic letter to the governor and legislature yesterday, the only way you can claim things are going great with water quality in Florida is to make up the numbers.

So here is what the governor and legislature need to understand: you can waste a year doing more "planning" how to fit 10 gallons of sludge into a one gallon bucket or you can go back and fix last year's bill.

A fix would require Senate president Joe Negron to do heavier lifting than any Florida leader has ever done in opposition to the sugar cartel.

The fix would require stripping from the current law, the provisions that prohibit eminent domain (yes, the same eminent domain that President Trump will need to use to build that wall), that prohibit the state from negotiating with unwilling sellers, and the provision for the C51 reservoir that awarded one billionaire family, the Fanjuls, a path to use their land to sell dirty rainwater/ flood runoff to Floridians for water supply. These three poison pills found their way into last year's law because Big Sugar squeezed the legislature. Scott and the cabinet agreed to be squeezed. And Democrats in the state senate helped because they too love to be squeezed by Big Sugar.

We've already heard Big Sugar's answer to its critics, "Take your seat at the back of the bus. Be grateful you have anything at all." Like Rod Tirrell, many who love Florida's water, Florida's quality of life, and depend on a healthy, vibrant tourism industry have been at this a long time. It costs nothing to tell the truth about a piece of legislation. Rod Tirrell wouldn't have it any other way, and that is why he was a real Everglades warrior.

Discrimination in Water Management Decission Letter and Attachments by Alan Farago on Scribd

A last chance for Florida's future rests with Senate President Joe Negron and the Florida legislature ... by gimleteye

Senate President Joe Negron responded to voters in his district and across the state, where toxic pollution from Lake Okeechobee is wrecking property values, quality of life and economic opportunities

On Thursday, the Treasure Coast Palm is sponsoring a town meeting featuring Senate President Joe Negron on the most important legislation to emerge from 2017 session of the state legislature; a massive new reservoir on public lands south of sugar fields to stop the toxic runoff from Lake Okeechobee and to re-hydrate the Everglades and Florida Bay with clean, fresh water.

The 2017 legislation was approved by the legislature after Florida’s coastal areas were devastated by toxic algae blooms in the winter of 2015/2016. Water managers were forced to dump billions of gallons of toxic water from Lake Okechobee. It couldn't be shunted onto sugar lands, and so managers released a toxic tsunami into waterways and badly fouled both Florida coasts.

The water management infrastructure in South Florida is controlled by the state and the US government through the Jacksonville District of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Florida Gov. Rick Scott directs policies and implementation through his appointees to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District.

The political strings that tie Scott are pulled by the wealthiest and most powerful agribusiness producers in the United States.

Big Sugar fought Negron's 2017 legislation, but a big part of the fight -- deploying more lobbyists than state senators --  was crocodile tears. Big Sugar knows how hard it is to protect downstream local businesses on both Florida coasts, property values, rivers and estuaries and to get more clean, fresh water into the Everglades and Florida Bay without harming the resources of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians in the process. It knows because its business is to get what it wants. In the end Big Sugar got what it wanted through Gov. Rick Scott and the legislature -- a law favorable to its terms --and more.

The state legislature inserted poison pills: a prohibition against eminent domain in the EAA, a requirement that the state negotiate for land swaps only with “willing sellers”, and a provision that allows taxpayer moneys to fund the future privatization of Florida’s water supply, anticipating the day when big landowners will be allowed by the state to sell rainwater for their own profit. If there was hope, it lay in only one place: that the District could consider a larger footprint and additional lands to secure the required water quality standard.

Environmentalists praised Senator Negron’s initiative but settled in for the long haul, knowing that the law stipulated the District had to report its recommended action to the legislature by January 9th, 2018.

That deadline is fast approaching, hence the town meeting where Senator Negron will listen to the public’s rising concern about what the District proposes, including protesters who will be bused into Stuart from the farm communities.

In December, under an accelerated, vacation-heavy time line, the District released a suite of proposals that met with immediate objection by environmentalists. While the District provided data in support of its proposals, they ignored feedback they had made serious errors; artificially inflating the efficiency of water quality modeling.

Environmentalists feared from the start that proposed solutions failed to take into account a footprint adequate for treatment and cleansing marshes to complement the reservoir. They relied on the District following the provision in the new law to explore options for an expanded footprint.

In mid-December Treasure Coast Palm wrote, "Florida Senate President Joe Negron wants state engineers to think outside the box and outside the "footprint" they're considering for a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee In particular, Negron wants the South Florida Water Management District to "consider using any additional land available (for the reservoir), if necessary."

The Miami Herald:

Initially, a grander version pitched by environmentalists envisioned 60,000 acres. It included a portion of sugar fields long blamed for pollution and jump-started construction on a sprawling shallow reservoir south of the lake intended to clean water before it reached Everglades National Park — a project approved in a landmark Everglades restoration plan in 2000. The massive footprint allowed plenty of shallow storage to clean the water, a strict requirement hammered out through years of litigation that forced the state to stop polluting the Everglades. What landed on the drafting table of South Florida water managers was subsantially different.

In Florida Politics last week, publisher Peter Schorsch responded with a broadside from the Big Sugar playbook.

His roaming indictment blasted civic and environmental objections to the District plans. “Never satisified, environmentalists should just take win for Lake O reservoir“ aped the same outline as the Big Sugar sponsored, Sunshine State News.

Schorsch calls the outstanding issues over the 2017 Everglades legislation, a “food fight”. Environmentalists don’t know when to say “stop” and scorns the political ineffectiveness of environmentalists.

Environmentalists don’t need reminding. What they need is a level playing field. Big Sugar extracts its political money through the US Farm Bill, costing US consumers twice the world price of sugar and spinning hundreds of millions a year into Big Sugar’s pockets. The industry liberally sprinkles a portion of that money through the political ranks.

The public fears, rightly so based on at least one of the proposals, that the District plan is another step by Big Sugar to commandeer Florida water resources.

That would be a bitter pill for Senator Negron’s constituents and Florida taxpayers.

The “grand compromise” Senate Bill 10 was never meant to “settl(e) the issue once and for all” (Schorsch’s words) because federal court judgements on water quality in the Everglades are the backstop to legislative trickery on the Everglades.

Whatever progress has been made in Florida on behalf of environmental protection has been through federal courts, particularly in Everglades restoration where stinging judgments against Florida and Big Sugar, for allowing water quality to be trashed, remain the only bullwark against a tide of toxic political money.

Yes Big Sugar can buy election outcomes, but it hasn’t cracked the code to the federal judiciary.

It was, after all, the 2003 attempted heist of Everglades water quality law by Big Sugar and then Gov. Jeb Bush relating to standards, metrics and measurements that triggered nearly a decade of litigation by the Miccosukee Tribe and a small Miami environmental group, Friends of the Everglades, founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. That litigation resulted in a declaration of victory by Gov. Rick Scott who pledged $880 million in taxpayer money to fix his allies’ pollution. Environmentalists mostly agreed that the Scott Restoration Strategies could meet stringent water quality goals. Today, they claim the state is reversing course with an ill-conceived plan that will unravel every gain to date.

It has always been the case that “fixing once and for all” the discharges from Lake Okeechobee, so flthy water doesn’t puke on downstream communities on both Florida coasts, would have to pass the test of federal court judgments based on sound science.

The water quality standard protecting the Everglades is written in stone for a simple reason; if you violate the water quality standard, the Everglades ceases to function. This is not a “food fight”. It is scientific fact.

If Big Sugar gets its way, there is going to be a mini-Lake Okeechobee built with walls thirty to forty feet high for a deep reservoir with the same stagnant water as Lake Okeechobee. An alternative plan does exist — provided by highly competent scientists of the Everglades Foundation — but the District has refused to consider an option based on more land, whether or not the land is in public ownership.

Schorsch accuses environmentalists of “moving the goal posts”. It is a kind of drive-by shooting that glides by the fact Big Sugar's key players are engaged in the ultimate act of moving of goal posts: reverse the federal court decisions protecting the Everglades.

States rights is a potent theme in the nation’s capitol. Count on Gov. Rick Scott to raise the issue with President Trump during private meetings: "We need to end the administrative state and rein in the bad federal judiciary, which is holding back 'jobs'." In the case of Big Sugar, those jobs will be embedded in massive industrial and suburban development it is planning planned in the Everglades Agricultural Area only a few miles west of Mar-a-Lago — if they can confuse the science, manipulate fact, and knee-cap federal water quality regulations protecting the Everglades.

Big Sugar wants the federal judgments gone. They are working it, because they know so long as the judgments stand, it is going to be impossible to re-write the science.

That’s not a "food fight": it is a fundamental attack on the system of checks and balances essential to our democracy.

The only hope of mitigating disastrous, toxic pollution coursing out of the lake is a plan that includes a treatment area footprint adequate to the purpose of storing, first, billions of excess water during flood season, and gradually cleansing through a landscape of filtering marshes.

Contrary to agitators set to the task by Big Sugar, that does not require upheaval of communities in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

No one is talking about sacrificing jobs. It is a matter of using available land already owned by the public and swaps with Big Sugar billionaires to achieve critical purposes; protecting all downstream communities, the Everglades and Florida Bay.

“These environmental groups refused to be satisfied,” Schorsch writes and scolds environmental groups for “showing a great deal of ingratitude”, a Trumpian theme and half-step from “let them eat cake”. With Trump and Scott, it is too often the case that to know the truth of a matter, flip what they are saying inside-out.

Eventually voters will express their disgust at the ballot box. Whether property values, water and taxes are forever lost as sacrifice zones for Big Sugar depends on Senator Negron and the Florida legislature.

This is our last chance.

Part One: The Agony of Florida, Its Rivers, Bays, Estuaries, And Politics ... by gimleteye

Winter 2016: toxic scum coated many Southeast Florida river ways and beaches as a result of mismanagement by the South Florida Water Management District

Fixing Florida’s destroyed estuaries and Everglades and Florida Bay depends on voters and taxpayers re-engaging with public officials. Case in point: how and why a vast new wetland system — at least 60,000 acres — was removed from legislation, now law, signed by Gov. Rick Scott.

Before the start of the Florida legislature, Senate President Joe Negron pledged that acquiring 60,000 acres of land from Big Sugar owners was a top priority. The addition of significant additional acreage for water storage and cleansing marshes -- using lands south of Lake Okeechobee now in sugarcane production -- had been a science-based goal of Everglades restoration since at least 2000. And not just the Everglades.

By the end of the session, a bill emerged without the additional 60,000 acres. (For fifteen years, environmentalists had been urging the acquisition of 100,000 acres from Big Sugar.)  Big Sugar encompass about 700,000 acres around the southern rim of Florida’s largest freshwater resource.

The entire plumbing system of South Florida requires water managers to ease the pressure on lake levels under conditions of severe flooding and rainfall by shunting billions of excess gallons from the middle of the state to both the east and west coasts of the peninsula. This happens primarily through the Caloosahatchee to the west coast and the St. Lucie to the east.

To protect downstream communities and the Everglades from extreme flooding, the water has to go somewhere. The hydrological problem is not necessarily where it goes, but how much and how polluted it is. The political problem is that the determinative constituency that directs water management in Florida is not the coastal taxpayer or businesses that depend on clean, fresh water. It is Big Sugar and the beneficiaries of the most heavily subsidized agricultural commodities in the United States.

For many years, Big Sugar objected to land purchases on the basis that no funding was available. In fact, Big Sugar opposed every effort to put agricultural lands into public ownership, but when lands were purchased, the negotiated terms were always extraordinarily favorable to sellers including long-term lease back provisions that acted like dead weights on the original purpose of the transaction: to restore and protect the environment and its real, quantifiable contributions to a thriving economy.

With the passage of a constitutional amendment by nearly 75% of Florida voters in 2014, the core of Big Sugar's objection -- money for land acquisition -- no longer holds. Floridians -- Republicans and Democrats and Independents --  voted to allocate a portion of the tax collected from all real estate transactions to the acquisition of environmentally sensitive lands. The money is there: more than $10 billion over the next two decades. What is short supply is political will.

Florida's rainfall see-saws from one extreme to the other. Water management in South Florida, on the other hand, remains constant to the purpose of maintaining perfect irrigation and drainage for the Everglades Agricultural Area. Big Sugar's controls water management through massive political contributions and a network that reaches deeply into both the Republican and Democratic state parties and elected officials. This rigged system is economic madness and horribly short sighted unless you are one of those sugar farmers, like the Fanjuls, or a distant shareholder living on dividend checks, as is the case with the descents of Charles Stuart Mott and the US Sugar Corporation.

Beyond the political money, the next ring of the problem is hydrology. When it rains too much — with climate change, there is a rising risk that extraordinary rainfall will become routine rather than exception — polluted water from Lake Okeechobee must be drained to lessen the risk of a catastrophic breach of the lake's berm and risk to sugar farms. When it is too dry, Everglades National Park becomes hyper saline, triggering massive seagrass die off at the bottom of the ecosystem in Florida Bay, choking with algae blooms that continue for years. The Caloosahatchee River, emptying to Florida's west coast, also suffers under the both extremes; it fills with toxic discharges when it's wet, and like the Everglades, it needs clean fresh water when it is too dry.

At the end of the recently concluded session of the Florida legislature, the Tampa Bay Times reported: "Months of negotiation and compromise over whether to build a deep-water storage reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee ended in victory Tuesday for Senate President Joe Negron as the Florida House agreed to the Senate plan and sent the measure to Gov. Rick Scott for his approval. The proposal, SB 10, will cost the state and federal government $1.5 billion and will accelerate the state's 20-year goal of storing water from the lake by using land the state owns, known as the A-2 parcel, as well as land swaps and purchases. The House passed the measure 99-19, after it reduced the amount the state could bond for the project to $800 million, and the measure was then passed by the Senate 33-0.”

The Everglades Trust, an influential environmental group, praised the new law and its key supporter: "One development made all the difference: an outstanding lawyer, a state senator representing what had been “ground zero” for the algae, was elected by his peers to the presidency of the Florida State Senate. Armed with overwhelming evidence and science and backed by tens of thousands of supporters, Senate President Joe Negron made the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir his top legislative priority. Even at great personal sacrifice — he resigned his lucrative law partnership to wage this fight — Negron showed extraordinary integrity in leadership.” ("Against long odds, Florida residents won water battle,” May 18, 2017, TC Palm)

What happened to the 60,000 acre reservoir and why did it disappear? The simple answer: Big Sugar stage craft.

Negron had forged close links with Big Sugar early in his political life. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in Big Sugar contributions flowed in and out and between political committees that Negron and the top lobbyists and business leaders in Florida directed. It costs an enormous amount of money to wage a credible political campaign in Florida. State senate races in populous sections of the state can cost each candidate millions of dollars. Negron secured loyalty with the implicit backing of Florida's big donors, especially Big Sugar.

Negron, with Big Sugar's support, had already been designated the incoming senate president for 2017 when historic, heavy rainfall began to fall across his southeast Florida district in late 2015.

Something else was happening in late 2015 that didn't escape the attention of top Republicans like Negron: the GOP presidential primary was edging toward chaos.

When it started pouring during South Florida's dry season, causing water managers to open the flood gates of hell onto waterways, GOP voters were furious. The memory of an earlier pollution disaster, the 2013 floods and toxic algae blooms, had not faded. Dead fish and wildlife, water too dangerous to touch: pollution does not select for political affiliation.

As Negron’s GOP districts were rumbling with discontent, the primary campaign bids of Big Sugar’s proxies, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, were falling to pieces. Both had proven their worth to Big Sugar in the early 2000’s, spearheading passage of a state law that broke a federal state Everglades consent agreement arising over Big Sugar’s pollution in the early 1990's.

On February 20, 2016, after a series of lackluster finishes and draining $150 million in donor contributions, Jeb Bush dropped out of the GOP primary. Less than a month later, Marco Rubio was beaten badly by Donald Trump in his home state, garnering only 27% of the vote. Angry Republican voters punished Rubio in the March presidential primary and the toxic water spewing out of Lake Okeechobee was partly to blame. A devastating flood of pollution on both Florida coasts added to the fury of rank and file voters against the status quo although one would be hard pressed to find a GOP leader to make that admission.

Rubio is Big Sugar’s strongest ally in Congress, a result of long-standing friendships with supporters like the billionaire Fanjuls. It was the Fanjuls who rescued Rubio from obscurity after he retired from the Florida legislature when Big Sugar needed — in 2010— a opponent to run against then Gov. Charlie Crist. The Fanjuls were furious that Crist had negotiated an option to purchase 187,000 acres owned by its cartel competitor, US Sugar Corporation. Ever since, Rubio had been an outspoken leader against any further addition by government of lands in sugarcane production. In the primary, he defended Big Sugar’s federal subsidy as a matter of “national security”.

During the early months of 2016, the “Now or Neverglades Movement”, initiated by the upstart Bullsugar.org, put pressure on Senator Negron in his home district. The movement called for the rapid addition of at least 60,000 acres of lands in sugarcane production, for the purpose of rainwater storage and treatment.

Negron, an inside player, was unhappy. A year before the rains began to fall, Everglades scientists — more than 200 — issued an urgent call for acquisition of lands controlled by Big Sugar to fix the endemic sickness of the Everglades and the mounting, rising costs to estuaries, bays and rivers being used as a toilet pipe to flush excess water, due to rainfall, out of Lake Okeechobee. Public opposition had manifested through serial protests at the South Florida Water Management District where counter-demonstrations, in favor of Big Sugar, were organized through Roger J. Stone, a Trump insider.

Now or Neverglades Declaration: “Today, Lake Okeechobee is treated as an impounding reservoir constantly at risk of overflow. To manage lake levels, too much untreated fresh water is discharged into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries. Consequently, the lack of fresh water flow through the Everglades makes Florida Bay, the largest contiguous seagrass meadow in the world and crown jewel of Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys, too salty. The resulting salinity imbalances in all three estuaries cause seagrass die-offs, dangerous algal blooms, multi-year ecosystem collapse and economic hardship. Florida’s $9.7 billion fishing industry (129,000 jobs), $10.4 billion boating industry (83,000 jobs) and $89.1 billion tourism industry (1.1 million jobs) need healthy estuaries."

Athough the science had been established long ago, the urgency — highlighted by regular television news and social media outbursts including the “Now Or Neverglades Movement"— was compounded by politics.

Donald Trump won Florida with a razor thin margin of 1 percent. With only 112,912 additional votes, Hillary Clinton would have taken Florida. She would have been only 9 votes short of the magic 270 in the electoral college. The point is not what might have happened -- in fact, the ties between Clinton and Big Sugar are well documented -- , but that when Negron announced he had begun a process, privately conducted and outside of public view — that involved discussion with Big Sugar interests about land acquisition in the Everglades Agricultural Area, he defused the issue as a stumbling block for Republican candidates in November.

In August 2016, Negron announced his plan to make acquistion of 60,000 acres of land from Big Sugar, using Amendment 1 dollars a top priority. Big Sugar howled like a stuck pig. Florida Crystal’s information organ, Sunshine State News, called it "politicial theater” and a “waste of time”. What happened next: Big Sugar mobilized its GOP base. But Big Sugar had put in place a public relations campaign in South Florida many months earlier, nearly as soon as the rains began to fall and Bullsugar.org emerged on Facebook with tens of thousands of followers.

From August through the November, Big Sugar doubled down, taking out full-page ads in daily newspapers from Stuart to Palm Beach. It waged jobs! jobs! jobs! arguments from North Florida to Martin County to rural enclaves south of Lake Okeechobee where poor African American and Hispanic farmworkers -- mostly Democratic voters -- were once again trotted out to lament economic harms that could come to their employers. Septic tanks were to blame or water quality from north of Lake Okeechobee: Big Sugar's fingers pointed everywhere except itself. The South Florida Water Management District, a taxing agency that funds the state portion of Everglades restoration, began sending out public announcements called “Get the Facts” that read like political flyers from Big Sugar itself.

The campaign in the summer of 2016 involved rattling as many cages as Big Sugar could identify; Big Sugar organized opposition from North Florida legislators and business leaders who like to complain that Democratic south Florida gets all the budget dollars, it linked for African American legislators "Black Lives Matter" to "Glades Lives Matter, it hired scientists to counter the Everglades Foundation hydrologists, it brought its attacks to a nasty, personal level, it recruited minor public officials and representatives of minority communities who claim concern for poor rural jobs and businesses that depend on sugarcane or else.

So there is no additional storage and treatment marshes in the new Everglades law. Lands already in public ownership were offered by the state legislature back to the public with funding for a deep lake under a new name, a new purpose, and under extraordinarily favorable terms to Big Sugar.

Announcing land acquisition would be one of his top priorities, Senator Negron clearly understood he might as well have waved a personal invitation to Big Sugar: I’m putting a target on my back, come get me. But his long standing ties to Big Sugar meant at a bare minimum, Negron knew Big Sugar would rally its GOP base and that, moreover, he would not have the last word on any legislative proposal once the dust from the November election cleared and state legislators went to work in Tallahassee.

An Everglades Dirge ... by gimleteye

Everglades National Park, after a fire

A former director of Friends of the Everglades once said, "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." Joe Podgor was prescient.

What he meant was that by the early 1990's all the parties, including dozens of governmental agencies and special interests and environmentalists had coalesced around the opportunity to protect the Everglades, America's treasured wetland wilderness. There were critical lessons to be learned. For instance, that science and fact matter more than politics. This was a moment to shine. Instead, public policies headed deep, deep into the weeds.

The template of "cooperation" that formed around Everglades restoration -- fixing the water plumbing of what originally encompassed the entire southern half of the state, from the Kissimmee River north of Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay -- was a drill for humantiy's most complex problem: how to protect the planet that sustains us. Back in the 1990's, we didn't have time to lose, either in the Everglades or with global warming.

On the latter front, we lost a lot of time. Today, President Trump and a Congress represent fossil fuel polluters while the Trump administration falls even further backwards on climate change. Small consolation that former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently urged world leaders "to ignore" Trump on climate change.

On the former -- Everglades restoration -- a similar circumstance is unfolding. Florida is controlled by Big Sugar and its bottomless campaign contributions to the executive branch and state legislature. Sugar's proxies are laced throughout. They include Gov. Rick Scott, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam, who plans to run for governor, and US Senator Marco Rubio.

What they are saying is, in effect, "I accept that Big Sugar will dictate any regulation or governmental initiative on the Everglades that involves in any way its profit models."

There are a few dissenters. Notably State Senator Jose Javier Rodriguez, from Miami, put science and reason on the front burner where it belongs.

Bullsugar.org -- one of the most forward leaning of the state's environmental groups and a founder of the Now Or Neverglades Movement -- yesterday issued this statement:

"It appears likely the legislation (Negron's SB 10) will go directly to the House floor without committee review as session enters its final days. Whatever process gets us there, Floridians deserve to see a plan that will actually work – and a plan that is put into action immediately. The compromise on this bill already occurred in the Senate, and it was a big one. The reservoir capacity was shrunk by 1/3, from 360,000 acre feet to 240,000. If the reservoir is too small, or there is not enough treatment marsh to filter pollutants out quickly enough to allow water to be sent south 52 weeks a year, it won't work. Think of all we stand to lose ... Everglades National Park, the drinking water supply for eight million Floridians, the estuaries and economies on both coasts. It is not an exaggeration to say South Florida's future depends on not shortchanging this project."

For the thirty years I've been involved as a close observer and participant in Everglades restoration, the number that has always been fixed as necessity is an additional 1,000,000 acre feet of water storage. Not 360,000 acre feet and certainly not 240,000. That's the number of acre feet of water needed to store water adequate to the purpose of rehydrating the Everglades and protecting Florida's estuaries. Not so long ago, the number equated to 100,000 acres. The point of the arithmetic is simple: if you have a hundred thousand acres, and put one foot of water on them, you get a million acre feet. Less land then you have to stack water much, much deeper.

In this session of the legislature and the current bill for the Everglades? The acreage has dropped from from an aspirational purchase from Big Sugar of 100,000 to 60,000 to the current version, more or less 14,000 additional acres.

Senate President Negron is trying to fix the only deal he could make with Big Sugar. For its part, Big Sugar launched a deep, multi-pronged public relations campaign against the bill until it got what it wanted. The deal takes eminent domain off the table in the Everglades Agricultural Area (eminent domain is prominently being used for Trump's wall against Mexico), opens a massive change in Florida water law that will lead to privatization -- ie. farmers selling rainfall to the public and making the public pay for engineering to make sure the water is cleaned up after being rinsed in Big Sugar's pollution -- and puts any hard and fast reckoning so far into the future that if it doesn't work, there will be no recourse but go back to Big Sugar for another round of "negotiation".

The physical science: to get 240,000 acre feet of water under the Negron plan will require building a pond with walls over thirty five feet high to meet US Army Corps of Engineers flood criteria, with a circumference of more than 20 miles, at a cost of $2 to $4 billion.

And if the Big Sugar plan doesn't work? That's the reason for a dirge. We will have the same result as waiting for sea levels to rise ten feet in Florida then going back to ExxonMobil and asking what is the company going to do about it.

The problem is a political system that is overwhelmed by campaign money from insiders, burying science and every piece of common sense. As true with climate change as it is with the Everglades. Especially the part about funding disinformation campaigns and outright lies. Yes, the problem is also a lobbyist culture, a complacent media and political gatekeepers who channel taxpayer dollars into a perpetual motion machine that damages the promise of democracy and liberty.

But if blame is to be assigned, the buck stops with voters and taxpayers. Truly we did this to ourselves.

Make Florida Great Again: Good Reason To Support Senate President Negron's Intent In Everglades Land Purchases ... by gimleteye

Follow on Twitter: @gimleteyemiami

After the historic rainfall during the winter of 2015/2016, Senate President Joe Negron faced constituents who were exhausted and furious that their estuaries, beaches and waterways were being used as toxic waste sites for filthy water from Lake Okeechobee. Senator Negron resolved, at the time, to do what more than 200 scientists had already concluded was necessary: buy enough land in the Everglades Agricultural Area, where Big Sugar is king, to store and treat flood waters when Lake Okeechobee filled too high, threatening the security of communities below the dike.

On Wednesday, the Senate is taking up what emerged from Senator Negron's initiative. Last week, Senate Bill 10 passed the Appropriations Committee. If it passes the Senate, the next steps involve reconciliation with a House version. Keep your fingers crossed and make your phone calls to legislators now, because the current version of SB 10 has strayed considerably from Senator Negron's intent.



The first issue: the size of a reservoir to hold billions of gallons of stormwater from Lake Okeechobee, the diseased liquid heart of Florida. Senator Negron, taking his cue from qualified scientists, initially aimed at securing 60,000 acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area to be purchased with moneys available from the widely popular 2014 Amendment 1 citizens referendum. Everglades advocates had originally sized the acreage requirement considerably larger, at 100,000 acres, to store fresh water at a depth of one foot, or, 1,000,000 acre feet.

Senator Negron ran into instant opposition from Big Sugar, the most political influential (next to electric utilities and cement manufacturers) in the state. Big Sugar doesn't want any land taken out of sugarcane production. It steadfastly opposes any exercise of the option to buy US Sugar lands, a deal the company agreed to with the state in 2010.

As a result, the current bill omits specific reference to acreage and instead substituted volume. The current bill refers to 240,000 acre feet of new water supply -- far from the one million acre feet originally contemplated -- that could possibly, at some point in the future, rise to 360,000 acre feet if the smaller volume fails to meet Everglades water quality standards established through decades of bitter, contentious litigation.

As the Treasure Coast Palm points out, the current bill doesn't identify any new additions of privately owned sugar lands to the storage plan. It only contemplates using existing public lands -- and maybe more sugar lands in the future. Lands identified in the current bill were not only designated for storage in the past, they have already received hundreds of millions of infrastructure "improvements" in addition to the cost of buying the land from Big Sugar in the first place.

The new plan is to build, in the midst of former Everglades wetlands now sugarcane, a mini-Lake Okeechobee with walls about 38 feet high, about 20 miles around, in order to store water at a depth of about 12 feet. The total cost? In the low billions. It shows how little influence citizens have in comparison to Big Sugar.

There is more.

To highlight a few issues: Big Sugar successfully lobbied the current bill to eliminate eminent domain as a legal recourse to buy its lands. Eminent domain is a tested way, though rarely used in the Everglades, for government to purchase property from unwilling sellers. (Triggering eminent domain requires a cooperative government agency. Under Gov. Rick Scott, environmental agencies have been hostile to the measure.) Although it is loudly held forth by conservatives as "government over-reach", eminent domain is often quietly deployed by government to serve electric utilities, road builders, wall builders and developers (cf. Donald Trump) when their plans are considered important public purposes. Big Sugar fears, at some fuzzy point in the future, Floridians could elect a governor who supports eminent domain in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Big Sugar, in the current bill, also inserted a major rewrite of Florida water law. Rainfall in Florida is a public resource. Government manages fresh water in Florida as a public benefit. The provisions of the current Everglades bill detonate Florida's legacy with a new statute to allow large private property owners to use taxpayer dollars to fund the planning and design of new treatment facilities on their land in order to then sell rainfall to the public. Water privatization is the gold ring that is within Big Sugar's reach through the current version of the bill.

The bottom line: Senate Bill 10 offers citizens only hurdles while providing Big Sugar a clear path to further socialize risk and privatize profit. Great if you are a Big Sugar millionaire or billionaire. If you are a fisherman, a kayaker, or maybe get protein for your family by fishing in water management district canals? Not so much.

There is still time for state legislators to get it right, but they will have to start thinking about what is in the public interest as a higher priority than what is in the interest of wealthy private corporations.

With more than 100 Big Sugar lobbyists prowling the hallways and bar rooms of the state capitol today -- compared to a few environmentalists -- the table is set. Big Sugar's campaign has been an aggregation of savvy public relations, promises and arm-twisting, using the same tactics it deployed in the mid-1990s to defeat a plan to assess a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to help pay for Everglades restoration. Still, to many environmentalists and civic activists, the Negron initiative is the last, best chance in their lifetimes to restore a measure of equity to Florida's fresh water resources, to private property along Florida's waterway, to economically disadvantaged who always bear the highest costs of pollution, and to Florida's treasured, iconic natural resources.

In the coming weeks, it will take considerable political skill for Senator Negron to succeed, on behalf of his constituents whose life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has been badly damaged by pollution spewing from Lake Okeechobee. Citizens can help by calling state legislators now and ask that the current Senate Bill 10 and the House version retain the initial purpose of Senate President Negron: make Florida great again.

Support for Senate President Joe Negron and SB 10 to provide for a new, huge reservoir in sugarcane lands rises to the top of the Florida legislative agenda ... by gimleteye

Greetings,

The awesome support over 40,000 of us have shown by believing in the Now or Neverglades Declaration has moved the bar up another notch. We have GREAT NEWS to share! (If you haven't signed the NOWORNEVERGLADES DECLARATION, sign here.)

On Jan. 26, 2017, Senator Rob Bradley filed Senate Bill (SB)10 to help expedite the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Reservoir. (Full text of bill, click here.)

As you well know this is a priority project for all who care about our drinking water, estuaries, the Everglades, and Florida Bay. The reservoir will reduce the algae-causing discharges into our coastal estuaries and provide badly needed fresh water to rehydrate the Everglades and Florida Bay.

We are now one step closer to achieving this goal, but there is more heavy lifting to do.

Please take this opportunity to reiterate your support for the bill by emailing your legislators today.

It's a simple message: Support SB10! With just a few clicks, in half a minute you can email your local legislators and Governor Scott.

Take Action Now!

Thanks again for your heartfelt support and our message is really making a difference.

Best,
Sandy Moret
Islamorada, Florida


Captains for Clean Water commends Senator Rob Bradley for filling SB10!

Captains for Clean water is proud to announce the Filing of Florida Senate Bill 10 designed to reduce harmful Lake Okeechobee discharges and provide needed water to the Everglades and Florida Bay.

After testifying before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Environment and Natural Resources yesterday we were extremely excited to see the quick response from Senator Rob Bradley that addressed many of our concerns. Committee Chair Rob Bradley noted that the “current projects fail to include one significant component that the majority of scientists and experts uniformly agree on – a long-term solution that requires additional land and storage south of Lake Okeechobee.”

Senate Bill 10 authorizes bonding a portion of proceeds from the Land Acquisition Trust Fund, set aside by the voter-approved Water and Land Conservation Amendment (Amendment 1, 2014), to purchase land and construct a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee to reduce harmful discharges to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries.

SB10 would add a new section to the Florida Statutes authorizing a Reservoir project in the Everglades Agricultural Area; this project has the intent of creating 360,000 acre-feet of water storage capacity along with the acquisition of 60,000 acres of land from willing sellers. This proposed reservoir is expected to hold approximately 120 billion gallons of water and would be dynamic in nature meaning that as soon as the existing storm water treatment areas are ready to accept additional water, more water would be moved into this reservoir that would also supply a much needed source of water in times of drought to the often parched Everglades and Florida Bay.

The estimated cost of a reservoir is expected to total roughly $2.4 billion. With the federal government paying at least half of the cost of such a reservoir, the state’s commitment would be $1.2 billion. The bill authorizes the annual use of approximately $100 million of documentary stamp tax revenue set aside by Amendment 1, approved by voters in 2014, over the next 20 years to finance the plan.

The bill directs the South Florida Water Management District to begin the formal process of purchasing land from willing sellers and operates under the 2000 Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a partnership between the state and federal government.

Senate President Joe Negron stated “For nearly two decades, there has been scientific consensus and recognition by state leaders that additional water storage south of Lake Okeechobee is necessary to stop this ongoing problem; from Governor Jeb Bush's historic support of the bipartisan Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan in 2000; to the recent University of Florida Water Institute study commissioned by the Senate and completed in 2015,” continued President Negron. “This legislation provides a clear plan to address this plague on our communities in a manner that respects the interests of the agricultural community and private land owners.”

According to the bill, If the SFWMD is unable to identify sellers of land appropriate for a reservoir through an open solicitation by the end of 2017, the legislation authorizes the Board of Trustees to exercise the option with U.S. Sugar entered into in 2010 to buy 153,000 acres of land in the Everglades Agricultural Area, for the purpose of securing the 60,000 acres necessary for the reservoir and to begin the planning the construction of the needed reservoir.

The bill goes on to state that if the State is ultimately unable to purchase land for the reservoir by November 30, 2018, the legislation increases the ongoing Legacy Florida appropriation by an additional $50 million for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which includes a reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area as a key component.

Please make sure to join us in Tallahassee on April 11th, 2017 for the NowOrNeverglades Sportfishing Day and remind our elected officials about the importance that our industry has to our State’s economy and overall quality of life: https://www.facebook.com/events/793871580765898/

A full text of the bill can be seen here: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2017/0010/BillText/Filed/PDF

Official Press release: http://www.flsenate.gov/Media/PressReleases/Show/2621

Sincerely,

Capt. Daniel Andrews
President, Co-Founder


The Everglades Foundation

As a loyal supporter of The Everglades Foundation, I want to share some GOOD NEWS!

Earlier today, Senator Rob Bradley filed Senate Bill (SB)10 to help expedite the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Reservoir.

I don’t have to remind you that this is a priority project for all of us who care about our estuaries, the Everglades, and Florida Bay. The reservoir will reduce the algae-causing discharges into our coastal estuaries and provide badly needed fresh water to rehydrate the Everglades and Florida Bay.

Can I count on you to take the next step by emailing your legislators?

It’s a simple message: Support SB10! With just a few clicks, you can email your legislators and Governor Scott.

Thank you so much for making your voice heard.

Sincerely,

Eric Eikenberg
Chief Executive Officer

Big Sugar hires 64 lobbyists, again, in Tallahassee to reinforce its closed loop system of government ... by gimleteye

Florida's most profitable industry, Big Sugar, and its closed loop system

Peoples' memories are short. Apparently in Tallahassee, few recall what happened only one year ago after historic rainfall in mid-winter, normally Florida's dry season, filled Lake Okeechobee to the brim and caused water managers to freak out.

Lake Okeechobee is the diseased, liquid heart of Florida. For more than seventy years and until very recently, the lake was used by Big Sugar -- that farms on hundreds of thousands of acres around the lake, mostly around its southern half -- as its cesspit.

In wet season, Big Sugar used to routinely pump water off its fields back into the Lake. That runoff was laden with fertilizer and other chemicals, like sulfate, used to increase crop yields. In dry season, Big Sugar would pump water back onto its fields, nourishing the most heavily subsidized agricultural crop in America.

Lake Okeechobee is part of a closed loop system that serves Big Agriculture, including dairy farms to the north. This closed loop system has worked extraordinarily well, thanks to the integration of industry profits in the operation of water management infrastructure. Those profits benefit some of the wealthiest farmers in the United States. The closed loop system requires constant attention; from water managers who work for state and federal agencies to the legislative and executive branches of government in Tallahassee who regulate both the flow of water and the quality of water.

The system's many moving parts also include an army of lobbyists who serve the biggest corporations involved in sugarcane production: the Flo-Sun/ Florida Crystals empire owned by the Fanjul family, U.S. Sugar Corporation owned by the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott through a charitable trust, and other smaller, but important players like the King Ranch, the largest land-owner in Texas.

There are some variables in the closed loop system that require the intervention of legislators and lobbyists. Environmental rules and regulations are one. The other: rainfall. Broadly speaking, environmental rules and regulations affect the region because the Everglades and water quality, downstream of Lake Okeechobee, are protected by law. So are the waters of Florida that serve the state's number one industry: tourism and real estate.

Although businesses that involve tourism and real estate are attentive to water quality, as an historical matter it has never been its top priority. As long as the sun shines and the weather is warm in winter and taxes are low, the state's biggest profit centers are complacent. For Big Sugar, on the other hand, environmental regulations are critical. Florida's natural environment is uniquely susceptible to injury from the chemicals in fertilizer. Its needs are also upside down from the seasonal requirements to put water on and to dry down sugarcane.

In other words, the closed loop system that serves both Florida politics and sugar industry profits has been superimposed over a natural system and that the entire arrangement mostly works unless one looks too closely -- through the lens of science -- and unless it rains too much.

A year ago, too much rain fell in South Florida at the wrong time of year. In December and January, nearly two feet of rain fell causing lake levels to soar.

Water managers, fearing an historically wet winter would be followed by a wet hurricane season, opened the lake's floodgates to lower water levels as a matter of caution and in consideration of a possible catastrophic failure of the lake's berm. Sugarcane fields stayed mostly dry as downstream real estate and tourism-related businesses on both Florida coasts were pummeled by a massive, months-long flood of terribly polluted water.

The problem with the Lake Okeechobee closed loop system, long known to scientists, fishermen, and environmentalists, is that it doesn't include enough water storage and treatment marshes which could accommodate excess rainfall. Scientists are in agreement: for the closed loop system to work, and not destroy downstream Everglades or nearby estuaries and rivers, about 100,000 additional acres of land is required to create shallow, highly engineered marshes to cleanse pollution that is primarily attributable to Big Sugar's farming practices.

That land must be purchased from Big Sugar by the State of Florida. There is the problem. Through its copious campaign contributions and through its careful organization of the political hierarchy in the state capitol, Big Sugar calls the shots. Because the state capitol is far from the population centers of South Florida impacted by Lake Okeechobee, and because Lake Okeechobee itself is geographically sequestered in the middle of the state, there is little occasion for the political order that serves Big Sugar to be troubled by urban and suburban populations.

Until it rains too much. What happened in the winter of 2015 and 2016 was that the district of the incoming senate president Joe Negron was puked on by Lake Okeechobee.

Negron didn't get to be selected as senate president, by his GOP peers, by standing up to Big Sugar. In fact, he has been -- like so many legislative leaders before him -- an enforcer within the Republican majority; who knows how political stars line up according to Big Sugar's influence.

Negron also pays attention to science. As the rains fell, more than 200 scientists signed a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott, urging the speedy acquisition of lands from Big Sugar to solve the problem of massive pollution from Lake Okeechobee. Communities and activists on both Florida coasts organized to support the scientists, passing the Now or Neverglades Declaration through social media sites and related groups.

Senator Negron has affirmed that land acquisition in the Everglades Agricultural Area is his top priority. It makes perfect sense that a legislative leader who has supported the closed loop system that delivers profits to Big Sugar would be the best advocate for fixing its costly deficiencies. All that is missing is political will of Negron's colleagues -- especially Democrats in the Senate and state representatives in the House.

Florida's future depends, now, on how skillfully Senator Negron can navigate a budget process where Big Sugar stands in the shadows, using all its financial resources to steer the outcome. According to press reports, there are 64 lobbyists in Tallahassee today organized to block Senator Negron's yet-to-be-released bill.

The question government always faces: who does democracy serve? If the question isn't constantly asked, the institutional exercise of democracy turns into an elaborate pageant or Kabuki drama where every role and plot-point has been honed through generations of actors. Each takes the stage to replace who came before. In time, with each successive performance, they become skilled, then aged by term limits, then fade from view to yield to a younger generation, trained by lobbyists. The retired stars are richly rewarded, with good seats in the skyboxes.

Florida's government is a closed loop system, and it will take all the skill Senate president Joe Negron can muster to protect the state from the destiny of all closed loop systems that fail to adapt to changing circumstances.



Opposition to Joe Negron's Lake Okeechobee land buy shapes up and it's strong
Isadora Rangel, Treasure Coast Palm
isadora.rangel@tcpalm.com Published 5:42 p.m. ET Jan. 13, 2017 | Updated 6:17 p.m. ET Jan. 13, 2017

When Senate President Joe Negron announced his plan to reduce Lake Okeechobee discharges last year, he acknowledged his upcoming challenge: to convince the Legislature to fund it.

That challenge began taking shape Wednesday as the Senate had its first meeting to discuss how to curb discharges.

Senator Joe Negron and the last, best chance for taxpayers and voters to escape the mismanagement of Florida's waters ... by gimleteye

The big controversy in the Florida legislature this session is Senate president Joe Negron's effort to fund the acquisition of 60,000 acres of land now in sugarcane production. Although a bill has not been publicly released, there is speculation whether his plan will be approved by the Florida legislature and Gov. Rick Scott.

It is a battle royale because the acquisition frames a central issue for one of the nation's most politically important states: who controls water? The paradox is that whatever the outcome,  Big Sugar comes out the winner. In the current status quo, Big Sugar calls the shots. It is spending a fortune to stop Senator Negron's initiative, including a continuous blizzard of PR tactics, but the moment Big Sugar can extract the MAXIMUM offer by the state for their lands, the golden spigot will shut off.

In the meantime, most media reports lose focus on the fact that this isn't a new battle. Efforts by environmentalists to re-arrange South Florida's water management infrastructure and equitably serve the needs of the economy and the environment have stretched out for so many decades that public attention has tended to wander, "I thought we saved the Everglades."

Despite billions spent, it is not true. Florida's political and economic status quo incentivize all the wrong policies instead of positive steps based on sound science. To prove this point, consider one of Big Sugar's principal allies: the state's largest electric utility, Florida Power and Light.

FPL is pushing hard for final permitting to build two new nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point facility in Homestead. In October 2016, according to Barry White of the Citizens Alliance for Safe Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved " ... a plan to inject toxic chemicals and liquid radiological waste (radwaste) from the reactors into the Boulder Zone at 3,000 feet into the Floridan Aquifer on the assumption that it is hermetically sealed and the waste water would stay there forever."

This "plan" resembles in its key aspects one of Big Sugar's central delaying tactics in the multi-decadal fight to maintain its prerogatives. Like FPL, Big Sugar also supports using underground aquifers that connect to the drinking water supply serving millions of Floridians and visitors in order to avoid fully accounting for the cost of its pollution.

In the case of Big Sugar, the pollutant is excess fertilizer including highly toxic chemicals added by industry to its waste stream. Its plan is to dump "excess" water into aquifer storage and recovery wells; an engineering strategy the late John Marshall, founder of the Arthur Marshall Foundation, called, "vertical parking lots".

Regarding FPL's planned aquifer destruction, CASE tried to offer the Nuclear Regulatory Commission evidence of connectivity and permeability between all levels and areas of the Floridan Aquifer and all other parts of the 4,000 square mile Biscayne Aquifer in South Florida. White writes, "Putting billions of gallons of toxic chemicals and radwaste with tritium, cesium and Strontium 90 into the deep aquifer presents irreversible pollution with potentially irreversible dire consequences."

The same happened to environmentalists complaining that the 2000 Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) called for the massive use of ASR wells; some three hundred were included in the original $7 billion CERP. At the time, the USGS, nation's foremost science agency charged with sorting out the public interest in underground aquifers, was not even consulted.

The following is from a 2015 USGS report:

Recent studies by the U.S. Geological Survey of seismic-reflection profiles acquired in onshore canals and offshore in Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic continental shelf have indicated the presence of tectonic faults (one strike-slip fault and multiple reverse faults) and karst collapse structures, and these studies substantiate the utility of this approach for locating feasible vertical-fluid flow pathways. The strike-slip fault and karst collapse structures span confining units of the Floridan aquifer system and could provide high permeability passageways for groundwater movement. If present at or near wastewater injection utilities, these features represent a plausible physical system for the upward migration of effluent injected into the Boulder Zone to overlying U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated underground sources of drinking water in the upper part of the Floridan aquifer system. ("Seismic-Sequence Stratigraphy and Geologic Structure of the Floridan Aquifer System Near “Boulder Zone” Deep Wells in Miami-Dade County, Florida", USGS in cooperation with Miami-Dade Water and Sewer)

John Marshall, in the 2000's, served on the South Florida Water Management District's advisory board, called the Water Resources Advisory Committee. Marshall was a fierce and persistent advocate for additional land acquisition in the Everglades Agricultural Area during these years. Today, the WRAC is stuffed with Big Sugar mouthpieces, lobbyists, and friends of Gov. Rick Scott. The WRAC, as a result, is providing cover for the state water management district to oppose Senator Negron's acquisition plan. "Stay the course" including the reliance on underground aquifers through ASR wells.

In May 2015, the following was published in Journal of Geography and Geology (Vol.7, No. 2):

The available evidence, including comparisons of chloride concentrations for injected and “recovered” water, confirm that ASR has not fulfilled ASR proponents’ claims as a means of “storing” or “recovering” water injected into the aquifer, a “new water supply” and groundwater “recharge” alternative, or a potential solution to the eutrophication of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Consequently, ASR wells simply function as additional “disposal” and water supply wells, without providing any additional aquifer capacity to support those groundwater withdrawals. Claims that “performance” of ASR improves after multiple cycles, or long-term injections are based solely on the ability to force larger volumes of water into the aquifer at a given well location. This phenomenon is the result of severe erosion and/or dissolution of the aquifer matrix comprising the structural component of the aquifer and meets the USEPA’s definition of fracking. ("Fractures as Preferential Flowpaths for Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) Injections and Withdrawals: Implications for Environmentally Sensitive Near-Shore Waters, Wetlands of the Greater Everglades Basin and the Regional Karst Floridan Aquifer System", Sydney T. Bacchus et al)

The State of Florida approved the siting of FPL's new nuclear reactors, gliding past economic facts Gov. Scott didn't like and a dangerous reliance on underground aquifers that he did like. He is doing the same, with Big Sugar. Both rely on deliberately misreading or denying science and fact.

Big Sugar depends on subsidies embedded in the Farm Bill, and who knows what the incoming Trump administration will say about those. No one is asking Big Sugar to walk away from 60,000 acres without fair compensation. No one is asking local communities to surrender jobs, without planning and investment for future opportunities. What Senator Negron has proposed is to fix Florida's water future and a foundation built at a time by decision makers who bought into false promises and bad science. This is the last, best chance to reverse that unfortunate course.

As the Annual Everglades Coalition Meeting Starts, A Message From Bullsugar.org ... by gimleteye

Polluted irrigation canal in Florida sugarcane field

Gimleteye (please follow my Twitter feed @gimleteyemiami): honestly, the most distasteful aspect of Big Sugar's disinformation campaign is that the outcome will make Big Sugar oligarchs even richer than they are today. One way or another Big Sugar always cuts the sweetest deal it can, and that's what all this manufactured doubt and yammering against land purchase in the EAA is all about. Thanks to taxpayer largesse and Congressional indifference/fear/greed through the Farm Bill, Big Sugar is already the most heavily subsidized agricultural "crop" in the US. Moreover, Big Sugar never pays its fair share of pollution, even though voters required it through an amendment to the Florida Constitution. The legislature failed to act on the law. What Senate President Joe Negron is trying to negotiate will make Big Sugar many hundreds of millions. Still, from an environmental point of view, whatever money is spent taking land out of sugarcane production and stopping suburban sprawl from filling in behind, is money well spent to preserve Florida's economic future, including the future of immediately impacted jobs and communities in the EAA.

The fake news industry kicked off the new year in style. A flurry of misinformation from US Sugar’s Judy Sanchez, Janet Taylor’s “Glades Lives Matter,” the Sunshine State News, the Okeechobee News and others introduced the following stories (in no particular order): Scientists are planning to flood Belle Glade and Clewiston Everglades restoration is a front to eradicate farming Toxic algae blooms don’t come from Lake Okeechobee Federal agencies are killing off endangered species Water can’t flow south into the Everglades in wet years Florida Bay doesn't need any more freshwater than it gets now Lake Okeechobee would be clean without pollution from the north Some of these would be funny if they weren’t part of a deliberate, well-funded campaign to clutter the news with distracting, contradictory noise that muddles messages about Everglades restoration, and especially Joe Negron’s plan to buy land in the EAA. They don’t need to fool anyone – just create enough irritating static to make people tune out. US Sugar singled out today’s Everglades Coalition Annual Conference, too, deriding the idea that one solution can help fix three estuaries. This isn’t just cheap criticism – the plan to fix Florida’s broken plumbing has a far better chance to succeed if it unites people and conservation groups from around the state. We’ll be at the conference, too, covering presentations, reports, and discussions. Look for summaries on our Facebook page and linked in next week’s newsletter. Stay Tuned: Calls to Lawmakers Needed In Tallahassee next Wednesday (January 11) at 10:00, a Florida senate subcommittee will hear presentations - for and against - on Sen. Negron's plan to create dynamic water storage in the EAA. The agenda is here. We'll summarize the bill when we see a draft, and we may need people to contact subcommittee members. If we do, Bullsugar.org will send out contact information and key points ASAP. Many thanks, Peter Bullsugar.org http://www.bullsugar.org/P.S. If you can, please click here to donate to Bullsugar.org today. We continue to rely solely on individual support - not corporations, foundations, or institutions. Anything you can contribute makes a real difference!