How DeSantis’ hurricane response helped boost him to victory

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) sailed to victory in his reelection race on Tuesday, with experts saying his hands-on response to Hurricane Ian may have help boost his bid.

DeSantis’s decisive defeat of former Gov. Charlie Crist (D) came just six weeks after Ian smashed across the southern portion of the state — and days before Tropical Storm Nicole’s impact on the state’s East Coast.

Hurricane Ian deposited a huge logistical mess on DeSantis’s doorstep on the eve of the election, killing at least 114 people and leaving the state with at least $40 billion in damage — a toll Crist attempted to blame on DeSantis in an October debate.

In the debate, Crist went after DeSantis’s presence at a high school football game on the eve of the storm and claimed the storm’s death toll was “not a good record. And that’s not good leadership.”

Florida voters overwhelmingly disagreed.

DeSantis beat Crist by nearly 20 percentage points, a massive margin and especially notable given he barely eked out a victory over Andrew Gillum (D) in 2018, with a margin of less than 1 percent.

DeSantis’s response to Ian likely boosted the governor’s appeal, conservative political scientist Mario Loyola of Florida International University told Equilibrium.

“From the very beginning, [DeSantis] swung the state resources into action and organized the responses that people could see visibly,” Loyola said, pointing to “the Florida Power and Light Trucks and the Publix Supermarket trucks and everything, from showing up to repair the bridges and deliver food and deliver water.”

And while DeSantis’s profile has risen in recent years amid his battles with the Biden administration over COVID-19 lockdowns and immigration, among other issues, the storm offered a prime opportunity for him to flex his executive skills.

As important as DeSantis’s disaster response was his command of public relations, Loyola added, noting the governor projected an air of competence and bipartisan amity rare in 2022.

”As a coastal scientist, I was very impressed,” ecologist Stephen Leatherman told Equilibrium. He favorably compared DeSantis’s — and President Biden’s — responses to Ian to past state and federal responses to hurricanes like Andrew, Katrina and Michael.

For example, after the causeway from Sanibel Island to the mainland was wrecked, “people thought it was going to take a year to bring it back. And he brought it back in a few weeks,” Leatherman said.

Friends for a little while: Shortly after the storm, President Biden called DeSantis’s response “remarkable.” Fast-forward to earlier this month, Biden called DeSantis “Trump incarnate” while stumping for Crist.

Still, DeSantis’s strong showing is likely to deepen the wedge between him and former President Trump, who has been widely seen as the presumptive Republican nominee to challenge President Biden in 2024.

Hurricanes can be a political boost:

• Research from 2004 suggested hurricanes in general tend to help incumbents, who end up individually associated with the goods and services provided by the state as a whole.
  

• That research suggested the quality of disaster response may not matter — with that research looking at the aftermath of the anemic response to the 1992 Hurricane Andrew, which Leatherman dismissed as “not a response at all.”

Welcome to Equilibrium, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Today we’ll turn to California, where voters have rejected a ballot measure that would have taxed the wealthy to support electric vehicle infrastructure.

Plus: Pinpointing emissions at their source, and a controversial climate proposal out of the U.S.

Let’s jump in.

California says no taxing rich for EV buildup

Californians have voted against a ballot measure that would have taxed the wealthy to fund electric vehicle (EV) subsidies, our colleague Rachel Frazin reported.

Taxing the rich: Funds from the initiative, called Proposition 30, would have also financed charging stations and provided support to wildfire response.

• Under the proposal, residents who made more than $2 million per year would have had to pay an additional 1.75 percent in personal income tax on earnings that exceeded $2 million.  
  

• The Associated Press called the ballot initiative race early Wednesday morning, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Billions at stake: If the measure had passed, it had been expected to bring in
$3.5 billion to $5 billion for EV and wildfire-related initiatives, according to California’s official voter guide.

• Earlier this year, state regulators approved a ban on gas-powered car sales by 2035.
  

• California has also been contending with major wildfires in recent years.

Governor may have gutted the measure: Polling just a few months ago had suggested a majority of Californian voters supported Proposition 30, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

• But television ads featuring Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) highlighted his opposition to the initiative, claiming that it was devised to benefit one company — Lyft — that bankrolled the measure.  
  

• Newsom and other opponents described the initiative as a self-serving tool to force taxpayers into paying for the company’s electric fleet conversion.

Funding needed for EV adoption: Supporters of the measure, which included most environmental groups, had argued that the state needed a robust source of funding to build EV infrastructure, according Fortune.

Advocates for the tax said that it could have helped Californians of all income levels be able to purchase them, Fortune reported.

Satellites monitor emissions in effort backed by Gore

Oil and gas operations account for more than half of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to a new database backed by former Vice President Al Gore.

The global inventory, released by the nonprofit Climate TRACE on Wednesday, homes in on facility-level emissions data for 72,612 sites worldwide.

• Of these facilities, 26 of the 50 biggest emitters were oil and gas production, processing and transport sites.  
  

• The inventory was presented on the sidelines of the United Nations climate change conference (COP27).

Detecting the undetectable: By harnessing pollution data available from satellites, remote sensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the inventory aims to unearth emissions activities that might otherwise be undetectable.

“This level of granularity means that we finally have emissions data that enable us to act decisively,” Gore, who is also a founding member of Climate TRACE, said in a statement.

Disproportionate data: Although the top 500 individual emissions sources represented less than 1 percent of total facilities in the dataset, these sites accounted for 14 percent of global emissions in 2021.

Zooming in on fossil fuels: Climate TRACE found that previous assessments had significantly underestimated emissions coming from oil and gas production, refining and transport.

Among the top countries that report their oil and gas production emissions to the U.N., the inventory showed that emissions are as much as three times higher than self-reported data.

Who fared worst on oil and gas? The top 10 emitters in this sector for 2021 were Russia, the U.S., China, Canada, Iran, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar, according to the inventory’s fossil fuel operations analysis.

Focus on flaring: Six of these countries — Russia, Iraq, Iran, the U.S., Algeria and China — were also among the top 10 countries to engage of the practice of natural gas flaring.

• Flaring is the combustion of excess gas — a process that generates carbon dioxide and methane emissions, as defined by the analysis. 
  

• While carbon dioxide has a longer-lasting impact than that of methane, the latter is much more powerful in trapping heat in the short term. 
  

• Flaring can also release black soot and nitrous oxide, according to the International Energy Agency.

What about methane? The top 10 global methane emitters, as identified by the Climate TRACE analysis, are Russia, the U.S., Algeria, China, Iran, Canada, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar.

To read more findings from the new inventory, please click here for the full story.

Kerry offers contentious climate solution at COP27

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry committed the U.S. on Wednesday to a controversial carbon offsetting tool — one that many critics see as a license for companies to pollute, our colleague Zack Budryk reported.

Kerry announced U.S. support for a new public-private carbon market in remarks at COP27, Budryk wrote.

• The so-called Energy Transition Accelerator would allow polluting companies to offset their emissions by investing in carbon-capturing projects.  
  

• “No government in the world has enough money to get this job done. We will only succeed with a massive infusion of private capital,” Kerry said, referring to the transition off fossil fuels.

Fleshing it out: Kerry said that the plan came from conversations with other world leaders, who listed finance as the prime obstacle to climate action.

He said he hoped the initiative could help get projects started that could then attract a snowball of further funding, Budryk reported.

Straw man: But critics say that Kerry is backing up a system that allows companies to “greenwash” their way out of their own emissions cuts.

• “Carbon markets are not climate finance,” Kelly Stone of nonprofit group Action Aid said in a statement, referring to the direct investment in carbon-reducing projects.
  

• “Secretary Kerry keeps repeating that public finance alone will not be enough to meet our climate goals, but no one is actually claiming this,” Stone added.

Critique of carbon markets: The criticism is that voluntary markets may help fund new carbon-reducing projects — like forestry preserves or carbon-sucking direct air capture — but generally fail to deliver “deep, real cuts in emissions,” Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Reuters.

• However lucrative, a new carbon market is “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs as the climate ship is going down,” Cleetus added. 
  

• That’s because a company’s purchase of carbon credits in and of itself does nothing to cut that company’s emissions, as OilPrice reported.

An additional problem: Even successful offset schemes like can also lead to “carbon leakage,” according to the American Bar Association.

That‘s a situation in which a successfully protected, offset-generating project like a forest simply pushes deforestation and emissions onto unprotected lands.

The value of markets: There is a real need for exchanges to trade “high value” carbon credits, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday, per S&P Global.

• These can be used to lessen the damage from hard-to-decarbonize sectors while new technologies come online. 
  

• But offsets should only be used after companies have done everything possible to cut emissions — and must be made far more reliable, Guterres said.

“The absence of standards, regulations and rigor in voluntary carbon market credits is deeply concerning,” Guterres added.

Calls for cash: Instead of offsets, low- and middle-income countries are calling for traditional, direct investment in climate-saving infrastructure, Reuters reported.

U.N. experts estimated that those countries will need about $1 trillion per year in direct investment — either grants or loans — to wean themselves off fossil fuels and adapt to a changing climate, Reuters reported.

• U.N. experts on Wednesday published a list of shovel-ready projects worth
  $120 billion. 
  

• “We can now show that a meaningful pipeline of investible opportunities does exist across the economies that need finance most,” U.N. expert Mahmoud Mohieldin said.

But infrastructure development will not happen at the scale needed “if everyone continues to pass the buck,” Mohieldin added.

Musk sells almost $4B of Tesla stock

Tesla’s chief executive and new owner of Twitter Elon Musk sold off almost $4 billion in company shares on Tuesday, The Hill reported.

• The sale appears to be an attempt to cover the approximately $3 billion needed to finance his part in the purchase of social media network Twitter, according to Reuters. 
  

• Tesla has lost nearly half its market value since Musk announced plans to buy Twitter in April, Reuters reported.

Reasons unclear: While it isn’t clear why Musk sold off the stock, he must pay more than $1 billion per year to cover the interest on the debt he took out to buy the social network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

• That’s substantially more than Twitter’s current $700 million in annual revenue. 
  

• Several large advertisers — from General Mills to Ford Motor Company — have pulled ads from the site following Musk’s chaotic first week.

World Wednesday

Greenland’s biggest ice sheet is melting rapidly, Ukrainians may get some respite from Russian energy attacks and the filming of an Amazon show is harming the environment.

Greenland’s largest ice sheet is thinning dangerously: study

• The loss of ice from Greenland’s biggest frozen basin is occurring rapidly and could contribute up to six times more to sea-level rise than current models project for the year 2100, a new study in Nature has found. The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream could add a half-inch or more of water to sea levels by the end of the century, the authors found.

Russian may be running out of missiles to hit Ukrainian infrastructure

• The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate said that Russia has used up more than 80 percent of its modern missiles, offering potential respite for citizens living in the dark, Euronews reported. Nonetheless, scheduled power outages continued nationwide on Wednesday — a result of Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

Concerns about environmental cost 

• Workers and environmental campaigners New Zealand have criticized the “enormous” environmental impacts and rampant plastic waste from the sets of Amazon Prime’s extravagantly expensive series The Rings of Power, which has generated five times as much pollution as a blockbuster feature film, The Guardian reported. “It’s appalling what’s happening, and most people don’t know about it,” one worker said on condition of anonymity.

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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