Thankfully it appears that Hurricane Idalia did not bring the worst-case scenario — this time. The last time a hurricane hit Florida, however, was catastrophic. It was almost a year ago when Hurricane Ian hit areas like Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island in south Florida as a Category 4 storm. It led to more than 140 deaths, flattened homes and businesses, and left billions of dollars in damage in its wake.
Of course, next time is the real question. Because there will be more storms like Idalia and like Ian. The inhabitants of the peninsula of Florida have known that for hundreds of years. We have records of a storm in 1553 that killed 700 people. But something else is happening now.
About 150 years ago, we started pumping lots of carbon into the atmosphere. Since that time, the average global temperature has increased by over one degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit. And two-thirds of that warming has happened in just the last 50 years. We are starting to see the real, destructive effects of that warming. Hurricane Idalia was the eighth major hurricane (Category 3 or above) to make landfall in the U.S. in the past six years. Over the previous six years, there were zero major hurricanes. In fact, the last major storm prior to 2017 was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.
You do not have to be a climate scientist to understand what is happening. The basic mechanics are not complicated. As we burn fossil fuels, we pump more and more carbon into the atmosphere. The carbon causes the atmosphere to trap more heat, warming the planet and warming the oceans. Those warmer oceans hold more energy, fueling storms that get stronger and faster. In fact, the extra heat increases the likelihood and severity of all kinds of extreme weather events.
Before climate change, Florida was already uniquely exposed to extreme weather. It is a peninsula jutting out into warm waters directly in the path of hurricanes that form every year. Now as the threat of severe weather increases, so does the threat of harm to this beautiful place that millions of people call home. Extreme weather aside, Florida is a marvel of human engineering. 150 years ago, much of Florida was an uninhabitable, pestilential swamp. We drained and developed millions of acres and turned Florida into, literally, Disney World. It is a great civilizational achievement of man over nature, and it is at great risk of being undone by the greatest civilizational threat we have ever faced.
So you would think that the people who represent that uniquely precarious slice of land, jutting out into the ocean, in the path of increasingly severe storms would be fervently trying to mitigate the risk and reduce the enormous amounts of energy we are pumping into the atmosphere. But the reality is literally the opposite. Florida’s Republican leaders are actually trying to make it worse. Gov. Ron DeSantis is refusing to accept $350 million in energy efficiency incentives that Florida is eligible for under the Inflation Reduction Act. He is saying “no, thanks” to hundreds of millions of dollars to help people retrofit their homes with energy efficient appliances, a simple way to help tackle carbon emissions and climate change. It is just insane nihilism.
His position on climate change is essentially vaccine denialism at civilizational scale.
On one level, it is hard to even believe that he would do this. But of course Ron DeSantis also turned against the Covid vaccines, an equally obvious benefit for his constituents. It is so rare in life and in policy that you are handed something so simple that provides so much benefit. And Ron DeSantis turned it away for political expedience. His position on climate change is essentially vaccine denialism at civilizational scale. To DeSantis, the existential threat to the peninsula he represents is just another political debate.
And it is not just DeSantis; it is the whole Republican Party. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, has put together a conservative strategy they are calling “Project 2025.” According to the New York Times, “the plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”
They are not even within the realm of a reasonable policy debate. This is not a difference of opinion about how quickly or how best to meet targets on curbing emissions. The strategy is literally to hurl ourselves into the fire. Let a thousand hurricanes bloom. It is deranged, and it is the consensus view of the Republican Party, whose nominee will have a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency next year.
This is an adapted excerpt from the August 30 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.” It has been edited for clarity and length.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).