The State of Florida is effectively run by shills for the oil, gas, and energy industries. Floridians know what that means: Every time well-meaning citizens or politicians try to lobby the state to pass energy or environmental regulations, the leather utility company boot stomps on Tallahassee’s neck. It’s not fun.
Miami Beach will soon chop down an estimated 815 trees in North Shore Open Space Park. On its face, this is very bad news: The park is the only public beachfront green space on the whole barrier island. Hundreds of residents have signed petitions urging the city to stop the plan.
No cherry-picked scientific studies can refute this fact: If the world doesn’t reduce the carbon it’s dumping into the atmosphere, Miami will drown. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects the seas could rise more than five feet by the year 2100. The flood would force millions of South Floridians to flee their homes.
Anne Posschelle rides her bike to and from work every day on the tree-lined, waterside Indian Creek Drive. But one night last week, as she neared the curve by 26th Street, she was horrified to see that almost all of the foliage — including protected mangroves — had vanished.
You can’t put a price on public safety. But technically speaking, if you want to split hairs, keeping Miami disease-free costs real money. Jaws dropped last fall when Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez revealed the county spent roughly $10 million fighting Zika, a figure it was no doubt unprepared…
The Turkey Point nuclear plant sits on the southern edge of Miami-Dade, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only county affected by the Florida Power and Light plant. Last year, Miami-Dade officials sanctioned FPL and warned that the canals used to cool the plant’s wastewater were leaking into Biscayne Bay. Radioactive materials were…
For 23 years, a science station on Virginia Key tied to the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science has carefully tracked conditions in Biscayne Bay. Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the school, has never seen anything like the data coming in since September.
Jack Black was standing in the dark-green, jungle-like backyard of South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard. The actor gazed at the blue-black pond with its prowling bass and sunfish, then up at the roof. Gleaming white solar panels, the slender, geeky Stoddard explained, power his whole house, including air conditioning and…
Earlier this month, environmentalists were aghast when the feds shot down a last-ditch effort to prevent Florida Power & Light from storing radioactive waste beneath Miami’s underground water supply. More than 1,500 people have now signed a petition demanding that lawmakers take action.
If you’ve lived in Florida for more than a few months, you’ve hopefully absorbed some firm rules regarding the living dinosaurs that populate our swamps and canals. You never swim at night, and honestly should never set foot in any freshwater that isn’t a swimming pool. You don’t feed the…
For better and worse, Florida’s early settlers exerted their will over almost every aspect of the Everglades, from the swamp’s water flow to the sharp sawgrass. But despite their best efforts at conquering nature, insects are still getting the best of us a century later. Zika-carrying mosquitoes briefly destroyed Miami’s tourism economy last year. And when locals aren’t swatting away mosquitoes, they’re blasting entire cans of Raid at palmetto bugs, South Florida’s unique brand of hideous, gigantic flying cockroaches.
According to Florida Power & Light, the Sunshine State-based electricity monopoly, the Sierra Club’s members are a bunch of extremists. “The Sierra Club is an extreme group, that takes extreme positions,” an FPL spokesperson told the Miami Herald last night. If that seems like an odd way to characterize the Sierra Club…
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided there’s nothing wrong with Florida Power & Light’s plan to store radioactive waste and contaminated water in an aquifer connected to South Florida’s drinking water supply. Last Friday, NRC officials shot down a legal petition from an environmental group asking the agency to reconsider FPL’s plan.
The herd of false killer whales, a kind of endangered, oversize dolphin, wormed its way into the narrow channels of Everglades National Park sometime over the weekend. The massive creatures, which can grow to 20 feet and 1,500 pounds, were soon trapped in the silty water, thick with mangrove roots…
Protests against the Sabal Trail Pipeline, the energy-company-owned natural-gas project slated to run from Alabama to Central Florida, have reached a fever pitch. Over the weekend, hundreds of peaceful protesters picketed and chanted in Suwannee County. They demanded that the triumvirate of energy companies building the $3 billion pipeline — Duke Energy, Spectra Energy, and NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light — reconsider their actions.
South Florida sits atop two gigantic underground stores of water: the Biscayne and Floridan Aquifers. Miamians get most of their drinking water from the upper Biscayne Aquifer, while the government has used the lower portion of the Floridian to dump waste and untreated sewage — despite the fact that multiple studies have warned that waste could one day seep into the drinking water.
In February 2013, thousands of amateur Gladesmen and vitamin D-deprived reporters descended upon the Everglades for Florida’s very first Python Challenge. The goal of the contest, which came with a $1,500 grand prize, was to put a dent in the state’s increasingly frightening Burmese python problem. But when the four-week challenge came to an end, the contest’s participants had captured just 68 of the invasive pythons. The hunt was scrapped until 2016, when participants fared only slightly better.
Mere months ago, environmentalists were concerned that the Florida Legislature was about to take the power to regulate fracking away from local communities and instead force the controversial oil-drilling process onto the state. But after months of protests, state Sen. Garrett Richter’s proposal to outlaw local fracking bans never came to fruition; instead, areas such as Broward and Miami-Dade Counties were inspired to ban fracking themselves in retaliation.
As a plan for improvements on Ocean Drive takes hold, Miami Beach business owners and residents say they didn’t know the city’s prescription included a measure to remove dozens of decades-old palm trees from the sidewalks along the iconic stretch.
Florida Power & Light — the only company legally allowed to give Miamians electricity — has made a series of decisions this year that, at best, have seriously frustrated its customers. It has hiked its rates for no apparent reason, degraded the environment, and actively tried to trick voters into backing a bogus anti-solar amendment.
Miami’s cross-bay bridges are a treasure. Some of the city’s purest joy comes when you’re careening over the Julia Tuttle or Rickenbacker Causeway with the windows down, watching Biscayne Bay sprawling out under you as you laugh maniacally at how cool your life is compared to your college friends’ lives up north. It’s a small joy Miamians get to experience year-round.
For nearly 20 years, Florida has planned to buy back land from Big Sugar companies south of Lake Okeechobee to help restore clean water flow to the Everglades. The plan is nearly universally backed by scientists and climate experts, who blame sugar companies for pumping pollutants into the state water supply, ruining Lake O, and occasionally turning the coasts into green sludge.
