Excerpt:
Climate advocates said the bill is a bid for national attention from a Republican governor eager to use global warming as a culture war issue.
Florida will eliminate climate change as a priority in making energy policy decisions, despite the threats it faces from powerful hurricanes, extreme heat and worsening toxic algae blooms.
On Wednesday, the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the legislation, which is set to go into effect on July 1. The measure also removes most references to climate change in state law, bans offshore wind turbines in state waters and weakens regulations on natural gas pipelines.
“The legislation I signed today [will] keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state,” the governor said, according to the DeSantis–friendly outlet Florida’s Voice, which was the first to report that he had signed the bill. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”
Supporters say the new law helps the state prioritize a concern of Floridians — energy affordability, which they say is threatened by excessive regulation. But some climate advocates said the measure is largely symbolic and would have little effect on Florida’s shift toward renewable energy. Solar power is booming in the state and, despite Republican lawmakers’ desire to curb construction of wind turbines, Florida isn’t windy enough to have piqued the wind industry’s interest.
Rather, environmentalists said the new law is the latest example of DeSantis’s eagerness to use climate change as a culture war issue such as abortion and transgender rights to bring national attention to himself and hit the right notes with right-wing voters…
Greg Knecht, director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, said the new measure removing most mentions of climate change “is very much out of line with public opinion.”
The latest survey by Florida Atlantic University found that 90 percent of Floridians accept that climate change is happening and 69 percent support state action to address it. Many of the survey’s respondents also reported negative experiences with flooding and high winds from tornadoes and hurricanes, which may explain why Floridians report being more concerned than Americans nationally…
