Zealots, cultists, and corporate apologists claim that tackling climate change is “too expensive.” Bullshit. Not tackling global warming is becoming punitively ruinous. Just ask people trying to operate assisted living facilities in Florida.
In an unambiguously titled piece, Florida’s 125% Surge in Property-Insurance Bills Sows Havoc, Bloomberg reports on a Florida business owner who gave up when faced with the rising cost of ignoring global warming.
For Filicia Porter, the insurance bills were the final straw. They’d been climbing steeply for her assisted-living business as Florida was battered with ever more-powerful storms, and eventually, the numbers stopped adding up.
So in March, she finally decided to call it quits, shutting the facility near Palm Beach that she opened just two years ago. That came four months after she closed an older location in Port St. Lucie, opened in 2017. Together, they left a dozen residents scrambling to find another place to live.
“Each year you see a rise. Why pay more?” said Porter.
Why indeed? It is a sad cruelty that in a state synonymous with old people, it is becoming too expensive to take care of them.
Bloomberg’s report continues with commentary from another Florida company involved in the taking care of old people business.
“We are headed into a train wreck,” said Pilar Carvajal, founder and CEO of Innovation Senior Living, a Winter Park-based operator with 339 residents at its facilities, which offer services including memory care and assisted living. Its insurance costs jumped at least 50% in the past five years. “We need help to solve this societal problem,” she said.
Carvajal is in the wrong place if she expects the authorities to “help to solve this societal problem.” As long as the likes of Ron DeSantis lead the state and Florida’s politicians pay homage to the MAGA godhead, Pilar and Filicia can pound sand for all the good it will do them.
It is not just business that is taking it on the chin. Floridians pay the highest home insurance rates in the country. The good old gator boys love to point out how expensive the Socialist Republic of New York is. But like all conservative rhetoric, it is vacuous self-congratulation with no foundation in reality.
Homeowners in the Sunshine State do not pay state income tax. But, while a married New Yorker earning $70,000 p.a. pays c.$2,726 in state income tax. A married Floridian living in a $300,000 house will pay c.$4,733 more ($6,366 vs. $1,633) than the NYer for home insurance.
Ron DeSantis and his minions will never mention that negative cash position.
Global warming denial is a state religion in Florida. As early as 2014, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection bosses banned their subordinates from saying “climate change” and “global warming.” Because, as everyone knows, the most effective way to tackle a problem is to deny it.
In March 2015, The Miami Herald reported what DEP employees had to say on the matter:
“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013.
“That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.” Kristina Trotta, another former DEP employee who worked in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a 2014 staff meeting. “We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” she said.
I suspect that senior management at the DEP thinks a “true fact” is one of the “alternative facts” Republicans offer when true ‘true facts’ are inconvenient.
The state has not budged from its “if you ignore it, it will go away” philosophy. Instead, it has formalized it. Last Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation deleting even the mention of climate change from state laws. It gets worse. As CNN reported:
The wide-ranging law makes several changes to the state’s energy policy – in some cases deleting entire sections of state law that talk about the importance of cutting planet-warming pollution. The bill would also give preferential treatment to natural gas and ban offshore wind energy, even though there are no wind farms planned off Florida’s coast.
The bill deletes the phrase ‘climate’ eight times – often in reference to reducing the impacts of global climate change through its energy policy or directing state agencies to buy ‘climate friendly’ products when they are cost-effective and available. The bill also gets rid of a requirement that state-purchased vehicles should be fuel efficient.
Who knew that ideology could be so fecking petty? Forget the effect on climate, wouldn’t buying fuel efficient vehicles save the state’s taxpayers money?
Conservatives love the poorly educated. Of course they do. When your product is a piece of crap, it is only the ignorant who will buy it.