DeFlorida Blueprint: How DeSantis has pursued a Teddy Roosevelt conservationist image
Breanne Deppisch
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DeFlorida Blueprint is a five-part series examining the legislative and policy record of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Florida legislature wraps up its 2023 session, DeSantis is widely expected to declare he is running for the Republican presidential nomination, putting him on a collision course with former President Donald Trump. The previous installments of this series examined his record on education, healthcare, and economic policy. This part will look at his record on environmental issues.
Ron DeSantis has styled himself as a “Teddy Roosevelt conservationist” on environmental issues, a contrast with his presentation as a culture warrior and anti-woke conservative.
As governor of Florida, he has championed Everglades restoration and poured billions into environmental projects — earning him the support of some environmentalists, even as he faces harsh criticism from major green groups for his overall record.
“Protecting Florida’s natural resources has been a top priority since my first day in office,” DeSantis told attendees earlier this year at an Everglades Foundation fundraiser.
He’s also taken other unorthodox steps for a Republican governor of a red state, such as directing the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to oppose fracking and offshore drilling in 2019 and appointing a task force to study water pollution.
Those efforts may soften his image for moderate voters. Still, he recently signed into law a bill cracking down on the use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in investing, he refuses to use the term “climate change,” and he used his five years in Congress amassing a voting record at odds with the goals of major environmental groups.
While DeSantis has won praise from conservationists for publicly committing to addressing sea level rise, stopping beach erosion, and protecting Florida water supplies, multiple environmental group leaders told the Washington Examiner that they view these efforts as inadequate.
When it comes to climate change, DeSantis “is an ostrich putting its head in the sand,” said Aliki Moncrief, the executive director of the Florida Conservation Voters.
Everglades restoration
On his second day as governor in 2019, DeSantis signed an executive order calling for major water policy reforms in Florida, describing the protection of water resources as “one of the most pressing issues” facing the state.
That order created an Office of Environmental Accountability and Transparency and appointed a new chief science officer tasked with coordinating scientific data and research and monitoring to ensure alignment with “current and emerging environmental concerns.”
It also called for $2.5 billion to be spent over the next four years for Everglades restoration and protection of water resources — a $1 billion increase in spending from the last four-year period and the highest-ever level of funding allocated for water restoration in Florida’s history.
He replaced all nine members of the South Florida Water Management District board, the powerful agency that controls water and land use in the Everglades, and expedited funding for the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Reservoir, a massive project consisting of both a treatment wetland and reservoir roughly the size of Manhattan designed to clean water from Lake Okeechobee before sending it south to the Everglades and the Florida Bay.
Since taking office, DeSantis has secured more than $3.3 billion in funding for Everglades restoration — far surpassing his original goal. More than 50 Everglades projects overseen by the South Florida Water Management District have been completed, broken ground, or hit a major milestone.
Because of DeSantis’s actions, “[W]e see more water flowing south to the Everglades and all the way down to Florida Bay than we’ve seen in a long, long time,” Everglades Trust CEO Anna Upton told the Washington Examiner.
The Everglades Trust group endorsed DeSantis in both the 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial elections.
“He’s been an absolute champion on the Everglades, and for reducing harmful discharges to our coastal estuaries,” Upton said.
Since day one, she said, DeSantis “has been focused on sending more water to the Everglades and reducing harmful discharges — he recognizes that our Florida economy runs on water.”
But others maintain he is going about it the wrong way. “The cornerstone of DeSantis’s approach to Everglades restoration is the EAA Reservoir, which is nothing near what true restoration looks like,” the director of the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter, Emily Gorman, said in an interview. “It is essentially an infrastructure project. Not a true attempt to restore the flow of [clean, treated] water.”
State and local criticism
During his first campaign for governor in 2018, DeSantis vowed to oppose offshore drilling and pass a statewide fracking ban, which his campaign website described as a “Day One” priority.
“With Florida’s geological makeup of limestone and shallow water sources, fracking presents a danger to our state that is not acceptable,” his campaign website read.
Two days after taking office, DeSantis issued an executive order directing the Department of Environmental Protection to oppose offshore drilling and hydraulic fracking.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, though, has argued that a hydraulic fracking ban is incomplete since it does not account for another stimulation technique known as “matrix acidizing,” which could be the preferred option in Florida, given the state’s geology and its relatively high permeability compared to shale formations commonly fracked in other states.
Lawmakers have since introduced multiple bills in the Florida state legislature aimed at prohibiting fracking, but none have cleared the Senate committee to make it to a full floor vote.
Pollution and algae bloom
As governor, DeSantis has taken steps to help combat the unprecedented growth of blue-green algae and red tide — two toxic types of algal blooms which have wreaked havoc along Florida’s coasts and in its freshwater environments in recent years.
In 2019, following a massive and unprecedented red tide bloom that killed more than 2,000 tons of marine life along Florida’s coasts and cost the state an estimated $148 million in tourism expenditures, DeSantis announced the creation of both a Blue-Green Algae Task Force (BGATF) and a Red Tide Task Force, two separate groups aimed at researching causes of algal blooms in freshwater and saltwater and tasked with recommending steps to help protect against future outbreaks.
But little progress has been made since their creation. To date, DeSantis has taken just four of the 31 steps recommended by his own Blue-Green Algae Task Force, despite the fact that he has had more than four years to do so.
Last year, a coalition of these groups criticized DeSantis’s failure to respond to water pollution, saying in a joint letter that the lack of meaningful water quality protections from his administration has resulted in “persistent harmful blooms” of the toxic algaes, a record number of marine life deaths, and an overall decline in water quality across the state.
Since 2019, bills have been filed every year urging Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to adopt the recommendations from the Blue-Green Algae Task Force — but critics say DeSantis has remained mysteriously silent. “He exerted absolutely no pressure on the legislature to implement what his own task force was asking or recommending,” Moncrief, the head of the Florida Conservation Voters, told the Washington Examiner.
Under DeSantis, “the approach and response to water pollution has been to treat, to monitor, to track, to predict — and none of those things stop pollution at its source,” Gorman said. “None of those things prevent new toxic algae outbreaks, and do not protect the public from the health threats.”
Resilient Florida fund
Earlier this year, DeSantis awarded more than $275 million to bolster infrastructure in coastal and inland Florida to help protect against flooding and storm surge.
The funds are part of the state’s Resilient Florida Program, a $1.1 billion program funded by both the federal and state government. The program is designed to help Florida communities prepare for the effects of flooding and intensified storm events, which have grown worse in recent years due to climate change, and to help communities conduct vulnerability assessments and identify potential problem areas before a storm hits. It also calls for the appointment of the state’s first “Chief Resilience Officer” to help coordinate response efforts.
When asked about the program, several environmental group leaders noted the outsize investment from the federal government — and said that DeSantis is responding with a plan for adapting to climate change rather than combating it by phasing out fossil fuels and increasing targets for renewable energy.
“There’s two sides of the climate crisis,” Moncrief said. “One is getting prepared for the changes that are coming. The other is making the crisis less bad — reducing the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.”
The Sierra Club gave DeSantis a “D-” grade on its most recent report card, which includes a long list of actions he has taken as governor that are harmful to the environment.
Among them are the 2021 Right to Farm Act (S.B. 88), which prevents those suffering adverse effects caused by crop or sugar cane burning from suing farmers for damages, and H.B. 919, which prevents local communities from adopting clean energy electrification initiatives by restricting fuel sources.
They also noted that as governor, DeSantis has failed to set any renewable energy targets for Florida, or goals to phase out fossil fuels in the state.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Congressional record
While representing Florida’s 6th Congressional District in Washington, DeSantis supported cuts to the EPA and voted against bills endorsed by green groups. He earned a 2% rating, out of 100%, from the League of Conservation Voters.
Moncrief, the head of the Florida chapter of the group, said that, as governor of the third-largest state, DeSantis is “just not treating climate change like the emergency that it is.”