Maggie Fernández showed up at last week’s Miami Sea Level Rise Committee meeting with a simple pitch. Her group, the grassroots Miami Climate Alliance, wants the city to account for all the money it spends battling rising seas and then sue oil companies and carbon polluters to pay the bill instead of raising residents’ taxes.
Earlier today, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt, a man singularly obsessed with plunging Miami into the sea, got caught living in a home owned by the wife of a prominent energy industry lobbyist. ABC News found that for much of 2017, Pruitt resided in a townhouse owned by Vicki Hart, wife of J. Steven Hart, the CEO of D.C. lobbying firm Williams & Jensen, which caters to oil and energy companies.
A new women’s rights organization is demanding that the head of Miami’s Everglades Foundation step down over his longstanding ties with accused serial rapist Harvey Weinstein. But billionaire hedge-fund investor Paul Tudor Jones is pushing back and alleging that the group is actually a front for Big Sugar. Tudor Jones…
Miami residents should hope Arctic sea ice remains as thick, frozen, and unmoving as globally possible. This subtropical city’s relationship with the far north is pretty clear: The more the ice caps melt, the more Miami floods.
After sub-hurricane-force winds blew out vast swaths of South Florida’s electrical grid for days when Hurricane Irma hit last September, residents began asking what seemed like an obvious question: Why hasn’t Florida Power & Light, the state-regulated electricity monopoly, buried more power lines underground to protect them from tropical storms?
James Taylor works for the Heartland Institute, a hard-right think tank funded by oil companies, carbon polluters, and other rich robber barons who pay them to promote fake science that supposedly debunks climate change. Heartland’s pay-for-play shtick is well documented and so simple a child could understand what it’s up to.
A federal judge Tuesday cleared the way for a developer to bulldoze 88 acres of critically endangered Miami pine rocklands. One of the last shreds of an ecosystem that does not exist anywhere else on Earth will soon become an apartment complex with a Chili’s, LA Fitness, and Walmart attached.
Last December, a platoon of bulldozers descended upon one of the last stretches of endangered pine rocklands in America and flattened the area to build apartments, a Chili’s, an LA Fitness, and a Walmart on the critically threatened area. The tractors would have done even more damage had a group of South Florida environmentalists not filed an emergency lawsuit and obtained a restraining order to halt construction.
Miamians get nearly all of their drinking water from the Biscayne Aquifer, a clean source of natural H2O that stretches underground from the southern tip of the state north to Palm Beach County. This being Florida, developers, utility companies, and scammers of all stripes are constantly devising new and…
Only one road lets cars enter and exit Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay Campus. The Arch Creek East Environmental Preserve pens in the rest of the area’s western border — and sometimes creates a traffic bottleneck that backs up through the campus.
In his 15 years with the Florida East Coast Railway (FERC), Natale Sacco performed many jobs. From 1986 to 2001, he fueled and maintained trains at the Hialeah yard and along the railway from Miami to Jacksonville, working as a switchman, engineer, conductor, hostler, and trainman.
As Hurricane Irma barreled toward Florida last summer, some workers faced an impossible decision: follow evacuation orders and risk being fired, or stay in the path of what officials were calling a storm of catastrophic, never-before-seen proportions.
The president of the United States this week proposed drowning wide swaths of the American landscape, and it barely made front-page news. The White House’s 2019 budget request proposes cutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate-research initiatives by 37 percent — from $158 million in 2017 to only $93 million in 2019.
When Miami Beach residents found out the county was spraying a pesticide banned in the European Union to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus, they were furious. Dozens marched to city hall with signs reading, “What are you really killing?” and “Naled does more harm than good.” Some demonstrators wore…
In February 2016, a tipster reported a septic truck driver for dumping liquid waste next to a Kmart off Biscayne Boulevard. Sure enough, when county investigators set up surveillance in the parking lot, they quickly spotted the driver pumping waste directly into a drainage manhole.
Environmentalists and health advocates say the proposed rule change would be devastating for Floridians, especially children and people who eat a lot of seafood. Yesterday, Miami-Dade’s government operations committee unanimously voted in favor of having the county join a lawsuit challenging the proposed rule, which has not yet gone into effect.
Miamians take pride in being able to shrug off levels of summer heat that border on nuclear radiation. We regularly debate which windshield sun-shades work best to keep our cars from baking while parked outdoors in July. It’s not uncommon to see people jogging in 90-plus degree heat as if…
We are wimps. After all that whining about the hottest year on record, cold weather arrived this morning and everybody went crazy. Iguanas will fall out of trees, the Miami Herald predicted. Plants will die. Tourists will head elsewhere. Well, there is something to this. Yesterday, cold rain turned to snow…
The highlight of the Museum of Ice Cream — the absurdly popular, made-for-Instagram installation that opened last month in Miami Beach — is the pool filled waist-deep with millions of rainbow-colored plastic sprinkles. It’s the stuff of social media dreams. But the sprinkles are turning into a real-life problem for the Beach, where city staff have gone as far as fining the organizers for creating an “environmental hazard.”
Bad sign: Twenty seventeen tied for the hottest year in Miami history, according to National Weather Service data. The mean average temperature for the year ticked up to 79.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
Before Miami Beach was the city of Miami Beach, pioneer John S. Collins planted a row of Australian pine trees along the barrier island to shield his avocado and mango groves from the wind. More than 100 years later, those pines are still standing — a remarkable feat, considering the average lifespan is 40 to 50 years.
Life in 2017 means grappling with the knowledge that manmade climate change is, at most, a few decades away from flooding Miami. Wedged between a threatened Everglades and a warming Atlantic Ocean and jeopardized by rising seas, salty water tables, and strengthening hurricanes, the Magic City is at the center of environmental news that’s impossible to ignore.
