Climate & Environment

Tucker Carlson is such an insufferable little snot that he was forced to stop wearing bow ties because they made him look like the estranged son Orville Redenbacher wrote out of his will. The premise of Carlson’s poisonous cable-news TV show is to catch liberal politicians and pundits in manufactured “Gotcha!” moments that then feed the conservative clickbait blogosphere for another seven days. If you appear on his show and let him nail you, it is entirely your fault. His show is useless, and you are a mark.

A warming climate means warmer oceans. And increasingly, research suggests that warmer oceans mean more hurricanes — and more powerful ones, too. So not only is Miami set to flood thanks to climate change by the year 2100, the city’s skirmishes with hurricanes are likely to become more frequent…

Virtually all 2.5 million Miami-Dade residents live on land that’s less than ten feet above sea level. In terms of real-estate assets vulnerable to flooding, Miami is the second most exposed city on Earth, behind only Guangzhou, China. And Miami is basically the poster child for the effects of climate change, because the city has already begun flooding on sunny days.

Here is a brief but not exhaustive list of negatives surrounding North Miami Beach’s plan to outsource its water utility to a massive private company: The FBI looked into the deal. So did the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office. The city’s own Public Utilities Commission did not sign off on the plan.

Mosquito season in Miami begins every year when the so-called black salt marsh mosquitoes, a buzzing cloud of bugs not known to carry the Zika virus or other tropical diseases, descends upon the area. The insects arrived a few weeks early this year — so, after sundown tonight, Miami-Dade County will send airplanes to blast naled, the controversial mosquito-killing pesticide, over wide portions of Homestead, the Redland, Florida City, Cutler Bay, and South Miami-Dade.

Miamians still don’t spend enough time worrying about global warming. Sure, we’ve got multiple city task forces dedicated to making sure Dade County isn’t underwater by the year 2100. But construction across town has continued to boom, to the point that it seems like real-estate developers believe they’re building in landlocked Colorado as opposed to a city that can adequately be described as “pre-Venice.”

On April 3, the City of North Miami Beach began negotiating with a global engineering firm to take over the city’s water utility, which services close to 200,000 people in North Miami-Dade. Clean-water activists vehemently opposed the move, citing research that water utilities run by private companies tend to get much more expensive over time and typically provide services at “cheaper” rates by cutting staff or services.

Florida Power & Light, the ultrapowerful electricity monopoly, and its parent company, NextEra Energy, spend millions lobbying in Tallahassee and Washington. And those lobbyists spend most of their time arguing against changes FPL’s customers actually want, like the right to cheap home solar panels or better clean-air regulations. Sometimes, they…

Sure, that Styrofoam cooler is handy when it’s keeping your drinks cold. But once you’re done with it, the light-as-a-feather material doesn’t go away — it crumbles into chunks of plastic that clog waterways, threatening sea life for years to come. Mindful of the environmental ramifications, several South Florida cities have banned polystyrene products…

For the past seven years, Florida Power & Light has battled environmentalists over its plans to build two new reactors and inject their radioactive waste 3,000 feet underground, just below the aquifers where South Florida gets its drinking water. Environmentalists have vigorously argued that science shows the dangerous waste could leech upward into Miami’s drinking water. And yesterday, those green activists finally earned a hearing before the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that federal officials won’t begin treating climate change like a real problem until a whole lot of people die or lose their homes. Donald Trump is trying to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, and his latest budget asks Congress to strip funding from every single federal agency studying global warming.

Multiple studies have warned that fluid injected into the “Boulder Zone,” the lowest section of the aquifers that sit underneath South Florida, could leak directly into Miami’s drinking water.

Now that Cuban migration into Miami has slowed, the city’s Republican legislators have pretty much decided that they hate refugees. State Rep. Carlos Trujillo in 2016 tried to give Gov. Rick Scott military power to police which refugees enter the country.

Since 2016, Florida Power and Light, the monopoly consumers are forced to pay if they want electricity in Miami, has been accused of the following: Leaking radioactive wastewater into Biscayne Bay; trying to trick consumers into giving up their rights to solar power; attempting to stash radioactive waste in an…

If it comes to fruition, American Dream Miami would be one of the largest malls in the nation. The $3 billion project is the definition of South Florida largesse: In addition to offering the standard list of luxury shops, American Dream would include an ice rink, a lake for submarine rides, a water park, a theme park, and an indoor ski slope.

About 1,000 people have already registered for Miami’s March for Science.

At the beginning of North Miami Beach’s meeting last night about a plan to privatize its water system, City Manager Ana Garcia asked residents to trust the city based on the commission’s track record. That was an odd appeal, considering that Mayor George Vallejo is the subject of an…

Public utilities never quite work great. They function without (typically) poisoning people, but they’re almost always wrapped in red tape and slathered in layers of needless bureaucracy. But lately, right-leaning politicians have loved to harp that selling off publicly owned water, sewer, or power grids to private companies will somehow cut costs and public waste.