Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is already leaking dangerous salt water into the aquifers that are Miami’s largest source of drinking water. Despite that alarming fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently ruled that FPL can move forward with a plan to build two new…
The clock is ticking. Any minute, Andrew Schumann could get called away for a momentous occasion—the birth of his brother’s first child. But at present, he has other firstborns on his mind: 18 Florida grasshopper sparrows. A lot is riding on the survival of these tiny chicks who will be no…
Florida’s rainy season began so slowly this year that farmers worried they would spend the summer under drought conditions. But then, in late June, a month’s worth of rain suddenly poured on Florida in just one week. The deluge swelled the artificially managed water levels in the Everglades, flooding the habitats of deer, endangered birds, and other critical animals and plants.
A major study released this month warned that fetuses and babies who come in contact with naled, the hotly debated organophosphate pesticide Miami-Dade County uses to kill mosquitoes, could actually develop motor-skill issues as they get older. The study adds to the growing pile of research that suggests organophosphate pesticide exposure…
Alex Martinez was surveying sea turtle nests in Miami Beach early Monday morning when a beachgoer flagged him down. On the shoreline at 10th Street and Collins Avenue was a 300-pound loggerhead turtle, dead in the sand near a freshly laid nest. A closer look at the nest revealed tire tracks and boot prints.
After Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement earlier this month, effectively ignoring the will of the American people, CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, and members of his own party, progressive leaders across the country vowed to battle climate change at the local level.
Some of Miami’s business and political elite have argued that because it might be impossible to stop the effects of climate change, we should let the city flood, capitalize on it, and perhaps become a 21st-century Venice. Vanity Fair has reported that some Miami high-rises are now being built with “washout floors” designed to take consistent flooding.
A small town in Miami-Dade County — South Miami: population 12,000 — wants to become the first in Florida with an ordinance requiring every new residential home, building, or apartment complex to install solar panels. Residents building new homes would then pay less to Florida Power & Light, the only power company in town, which still generates more than 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and operates a nuclear plant that environmentalists say is polluting Miami-Dade’s drinking water.
This year’s mosquito season is shaping up to be a doozy already: Black salt marsh mosquitoes, which do not carry tropical diseases like the Zika virus or Dengue fever, arrived a few weeks earlier than usual. The bugs swarm in clouds thick enough to suffocate livestock, and Dade Mosquito Control…
For well over a year, Florida environmentalists and water protectors have been sounding the alarm about the Sabal Trail Transmission Pipeline, a behemoth, 515-mile natural gas pipeline cutting through the state’s vulnerable wetlands and above the Floridan Aquifer, our largest source of drinking water. At least 28 protesters have been arrested for civil disobedience as they rallied against the pipeline’s construction.
When the Zika virus struck last year, Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control immediately began fogging with three pesticides: BTI, a group of bacteria that kills mosquito larvae; naled, a controversial chemical compound banned in Europe over links to developmental disorders in children; and permethrin, the active ingredient in home bug-killers such as Raid. Permethrin was sprayed at least seven times in Wynwood and five times in Miami Beach, but by the end of August, the county realized the poison had little effect and stopped using it.
Every year toward the beginning of rainy season, dense clouds of black salt marsh mosquitoes begin rising from the Everglades and coastal wetlands and descending upon Miami. For years, Miami and the Keys have fought back with a powerful tool: permethrin, a pesticide effective at killing the insects before they can make life miserable for South Florida.
South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard has somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the peacocks that roam his city. On the one hand, they’re beautiful and act as a kind of traffic control as drivers slow down to gawk at them or allow them to cross the street. On the other hand, they shriek “like someone is committing an ax murder” at 4:30 in the morning, attack their reflections on shiny cars, and leave poop all over the place.
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…
The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan — a state and federal project to restore the Glades to some semblance of its former glory — passed in 2000. That plan called for a 360,000-acre-foot reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee. But in the years since, climate scientists have warned that planners underestimated the amount of water the Glades needs to replenish itself, and that the original benchmark might not be large enough.
