In the era of worsening climate change, record-setting weather events have become less shocking, but remain as gut-wrenching as ever. So it is with Hurricane Ian, which made landfall as a category 4 hurricane and ripped through Florida Wednesday with 150 mph winds and flood waters engulfing numerous beachfront communities. As the Washington Post reports, this is "one of the strongest hurricanes ever to strike the United States." But of course, worse-than-ever is the new normal in the 21st century, when the Earth's average surface temperature is already 1.51°F above the 20th-century average.
Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis loves to hog the headlines as one of America's most aggressive culture warriors, with stunts like censoring acknowledgment of LGBTQ identities in school and luring a group of asylum-seekers to Martha's Vineyard with false promises. But as the floodwaters rise, he's temporarily reskinned himself as a responsible steward of his people's safety, thanking President Biden for his help and saying, "We all need to work together, regardless of party lines."
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But let's not forget that before Ian ravaged his state and knocking out electrical power for more than 2 million Florida residents, DeSantis led the GOP charge to undermine Biden's signature legislative achievement, one that might potentially benefit Florida more than any other state in the country: The Inflation Reduction Act. Despite the bill's midterm-friendly name, it's in fact the largest climate-change legislation ever enacted in the U.S. Through a series of tax credits and low-cost loans, the IRA aims at supercharging investment in green technology, which would not only lower carbon emissions in the U.S. but create pathways for the rest of the world to go green at lower costs.
Deeming the investment in green energy to be "woke capital," DeSantis has become the figurehead of Republican efforts to undermine Biden's climate agenda. He and other Republican governors are using state power to punish companies who want to redirect money away from fossil fuels and towards the green technology that Biden's bill aims to boost.
"DeSantis acts like a maverick, but his war on 'woke' capitalism is plain old crony capitalism," Kathleen Brophy, the climate finance senior strategist at the Sunrise Project, told Salon. DeSantis and other Republican governors are "weaponizing the power of the state to force the market to favor the very companies causing the climate crisis."
How this all works is more than a bit wonky — bear with me. The world of corporate investment has created this concept called "environmental, social and governance" (ESG) guidelines. On the climate front, that means moving money away from fossil fuel companies and into the green technologies Biden's bill is helping beef up. That, in turn, threatens the oil and gas industries to which Republican politicians are so beholden. So red-state governments are punishing investment firms that divest from dirty energy to go green.
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On the same day that Senate Democrats announced the Inflation Reduction Act, DeSantis signed an executive order barring Florida's pension funds from using ESG guidelines in their investment decisions. It's an effort to lock $240 billion of investments into oil and gas, and keep the money away from the green investment that the Biden bill is likely to make far more lucrative. Other red states have even gone so far as to ban their governments from doing business with firms — including many major banks — that use ESG ratings in their investment decisions.
Yes, I know: Readers' eyes may be glazing over from all this financial industry jargon, which is a big reason why this story is mainly being covered in the business press and places like Politico Pro, rather than in outlets aimed at general audience. Whether investment strategy leans toward fossil fuels or green energy seems like a topic too deep in the weeds, with little relevance to daily life. Ron DeSantis understands this perfectly, which is why he tries to generate more media juice for his war on green investment by using right-wing grievance terms like "woke" to describe this capital investment strategy. He also tried to hype his actions by declaring funds that use ESG ratings are practicing "fraud." In reality, Matthew Winkler at Bloomberg writes, "woke" investment is actually smarter, in purely financial terms, because it's about backing industries with far more long-term growth potential than the declining oil and gas business.
"Sophisticated investors today recognize" that climate change poses "outsized risks to sustainable long-term value creation — and that solving them creates extraordinary opportunities as well," Eli Kasargod-Staub of Majority Action, a nonprofit that helps develop ESG standards, told Salon. This is especially true with Biden's bill goosing the economic incentives behind green investment.
Shifting business strategies to attack climate change is also politically popular. Gallup polling shows that while most Americans may not know what "ESG" means, they emphatically support the goals. Three-quarters of survey respondents agree that impact on the environment should be a factor in consumer decisions.
The main takeaway is this: Oil and gas companies are having a harder and harder time competing with green energy for investment capital, so they want DeSantis and their other loyal Republican clients to rig the game in their favor. In doing so, Brophy argued, Republicans are piling "economic suffering on top of the human and social toll that catastrophes like Ian bring," by putting "the life savings of Florida pensioners and retirees at immediate risk, and obstructing the economic transition necessary if we are to have any hope of remaining resilient in the face of climate change."
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"DeSantis's short-sighted crusade against modern investing is nothing but an attempt to curry favor with the far right and fossil fuel interests, to the detriment of Florida's pensioners, companies and public," added Kasargod-Staub.
This past year has offered numerous ugly reminders of both the economic and environmental danger of relying on fossil fuels. Russia's war on Ukraine sent gas prices to dizzying heights, fueling an inflation crisis. Disasters like Hurricane Ian and the floods in Kentucky make abundantly clear that climate change isn't just a threat to human life, homes and communities, but a major economic disaster. Despite all the hyperbolic accusations of "Marxism" flung by the right, the banal reality is that Biden's climate change bill is as much about saving capitalism as it is saving the climate. Oil companies have made record profits while the world's economy is in a tailspin. Hurricane Ian will depart from Florida on Thursday leaving a path of devastation in its wake, and Ron DeSantis will go right back to doing what he did before: Protecting the profits of fossil-fuel company that are literally destroying the planet, while ignoring the economic and human disaster caused by his bogus anti-"woke" crusade.
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