Florida’s Governor isn’t giving an inch when it comes to indulging local media’s questions about whether or not the climate is changing, even in the wake of two major hurricanes that ravaged his state.
During a press conference, Ron DeSantis unceremoniously rejected a reporter’s question about when Floridians will hear the words “climate change,” fiddling with the nylon sleeve on his Florida State Guard jacket as the former baseball star settled into the box to tee off on the hanging curve.
“The chance of me virtue signaling for people in the media is zero. So do not count on that. I don’t subscribe to your religion,” DeSantis said to applause as he denounced the “tired refrain and song and dance.”
“I get you have an agenda. I understand that. I think you should be more honest about what that would mean for people taxing them to smithereens, stopping oil and gas, making people pay dramatically more for energy. We would collapse as a country so this whole idea of climate ideology driving policy, it just factually can’t work,” DeSantis added.
DeSantis, who signed legislation stripping the term “climate change” from state law just this year, has dismissed the phenomenon as a catalyst for hurricane consequences, including when discussing tornadoes well away from the center of Milton’s murderous gyre last week.
“I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something. There’s nothing new under the sun. You know, this is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history and it’s something that we will continue to deal with,” the Governor counseled.
As a presidential candidate, DeSantis flirted with acknowledging a more nuanced reality at times.
The Des Moines Register reported that DeSantis admitted human activity is one of a “variety of factors” driving the earth’s warming — a fact reporter Katie Akin notes that he’s been reluctant to admit.
“DeSantis’ own stance has changed: During the first GOP presidential debate, he did not raise his hand when candidates were asked if human activities are warming the planet. But in the Dec. 9 interview with the Register, DeSantis said he does believe human activities are a factor in the changing climate,” Akin observed.
That said, as DeSantis completed his doomed Iowa campaign, he made sport after that interview of going after hecklers concerned with climate change, suggesting that belief was transitory and intended for a certain audience.
Indeed, one needs a scorecard to track DeSantis’ positions, which shift like Florida’s coastline during storm surge events.
During a presidential debate back in August 2023, co-host Martha MacCallum of Fox News called for a show of hands from candidates who think Earth’s rising tides and record heat waves are human-made.
DeSantis rejected MacCallum’s request before any candidate hoisted their arm, explaining that he and his candidates are “not schoolchildren” and should “have the debate” on the subject before pivoting to an attack on President Joe Biden’s response to the deadly fires in Maui and touting his own action following Hurricane Ian’s devastation of Southwest Florida in 2022.
DeSantis’ position in that debate came weeks after Florida recorded record levels of heat, resulting in a “100% coral mortality” off the coast of the Florida Keys.
DeSantis stuck to his guns in the wake of Biden claiming that Hurricane Idalia’s impacts in 2023 were exacerbated by climate change as well.
“I studied history and they act like this is somehow unprecedented,” DeSantis said during a Fox News interview. “It’s not.”
“This area, the Big Bend, got hit by a storm, almost the exact same track in 1896 that had 125-mile-per-hour winds. So the idea that we’ve not had powerful storms until recently, that’s just not factually true. And so when they, that’s the first thing they want to say, you have to ask, why are they trying to politicize the weather?”
DeSantis also groused about “politicizing the weather” during a state press conference shortly before the TV hit. He condemned “people trying to take what’s happened with different types of storms and use that as a pretext to advance their agenda on the backs of people that are suffering and that’s wrong and we’re not going to do that in the state of Florida.”
In 2019, the newly inaugurated DeSantis dodged a question about whether he agreed with many scientists “that humans cause climate change.”
“Next question,” he said, calling on another reporter.
Months later, he seemingly ameliorated that position. His administration posted an opening for a Florida Chief Resilience Officer, someone whose job will be to coordinate Florida’s preparations for “environmental, physical and economic impacts of climate change, especially sea level rise,” according to a job posting. He followed that up with budget proposals to address climate change.
Yet just as his critics say the climate changes, the Governor also seems capable of shifts depending on audience and situation.
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