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…
There is no more obvious symbol of the sugar industry’s stranglehold on Florida, or its waning grip on the state Legislature, than the story of the Everglades reservoir plan. The idea — to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee back from sugar growers in order to let water flow freely south to the Glades after close to a century of misdirection and mismanagement…
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.
Two positions by Florida Power & Light don’t quite add up. First, the electric monopoly contends it’s leading the charge to invest in renewable energy in the Sunshine State.
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…
Floatopia-style parties — where attendees bring inflatable rafts and get hellaciously drunk on the ocean — would be totally fine if people just cleaned up after themselves. But instead, partygoers have treated the ocean like an open garbage can and left beer cans, food wrappers, loose garbage, and all sorts of marine-life-killing flotsam drifting in the current.
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.
The folks who support fracking or nuclear energy need to distract people, so they call their dirty, carbon-emitting industries “job-creators,” and accuse green-energy advocates of being “job-killers.” But that’s all bunk. Study after study has shown recently that solar energy is getting cheap. Scores of workers have been hired to make…
The history of Florida is the adjustment to intrusion. In the state’s short 172-year history, armed U.S. troops have chased native Seminoles out of the Everglades, pristine beaches once considered worthless land have become vacation hot spots, and cattle pastures have given way to Disney World food courts.
Ignore the fact that the FBI has probed the City of North Miami Beach’s proposal to hand the operation of its entire water system over to a private company, and brush aside that the third-ranked company bidding for the project, the French firm Veolia, has ties to lead crises in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Flint, Michigan.
Federal and state authorities probed North Miami Beach’s pending deal to potentially privatize its water system, North Miami Beach City Attorney Jose Smith said Thursday. “They found no wrongdoing,” he added.
Having a hand in catastrophic lead crises in multiple American cities should probably disqualify a company from ever controlling a public water utility. But that has not stopped North Miami Beach from negotiating to potentially hand its water services over to Veolia, a private company tied to the two largest drinking-water crises in America: the catastrophes in Flint, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Climate change is already making life more difficult in South Florida, and the signs remain ever more ominous that it will get worse. Just this week, scientists found that the Gulf of Mexico is freakishly hot for the tail end of winter — which could fuel monster hurricanes…
On February 24, Florida Power & Light — Miami’s electricity monopoly and the single biggest donor to politicians in Florida — lost a court battle with the Miami, South Miami, Pinecrest, and Miami-Dade governments over whether the company could string power lines from massive, 80-to-150-foot towers through South Miami-Dade County.
Because good climate-change news is about as common in Florida as a calm and pleasant rush-hour drive on I-95, let’s start there first: The vast majority of the Sunshine State now believes global warming is a real phenomenon supported by scientific evidence. That’s great! But this is Florida, so you know there’s a Lake Okeechobee-size “but” hanging at the end of that first sentence.
Sea-level rise has become such a problem in Miami-Dade that even Republican leaders admit the issue is real. “It’s not a theory,” county Mayor Carlos Gimenez said of global warming in January. “It’s a fact. We live it every day.” For once, we wish Gimenez had spent more time hanging out with his old golf buddy Donald Trump.
