Taking the heat: When will Florida get serious about climate change?
I’m back from our “Junior Journey” to Germany and Austria – the first regularly scheduled trip since the pandemic.
Junior Journey is a program envisioned and designed by the president of my institution with the intent of sending our students on intensive trips in other countries to widen their perspectives, familiarize them with diverse cultures and languages and traditions, and to do this in a way that’s fun as well as academic. Many of them are free to students in good standing; or at a greatly reduced rate.
Jetlag resets your biological clockwork in all sorts of ways, and I’m an early riser anyway (graduate school – and the fear that I might miss something). But 4:30 is early even for me. I spent this morning sitting on my back deck, watching a meteor shower; with a flurry of bats overhead as counterpoint, under the palms with good old American coffee. The Germans cannot compete with the U.S. in this regard. Euro coffee always seems weak and bitter in comparison.
I was grateful in many ways to be back in our swamp here in Florida. For one thing, it's cooler here than it is in Europe. Munich was running in the 105 degree range, driving everyone to the Alps-fed river Isar for a swim where it ran through the “English Garden.”
There is almost no air-conditioning in Germany; less in Austria. Not because Germans are tougher than Floridians, but because until relatively recent years, they’ve never needed it during summer, and winter was upon them so fast that even if they did, the heat was over so quickly they hardly noticed.
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Not so now, nor for the past few years. Although I know that climate change is usually measured in eons rather than decades, there is no avoiding the fact that the Earth is simply hotter than it was, and that greenhouse gas emissions are making it worse – maybe a whole lot worse.
Euro politicians have lately been forced to take energy policy seriously – but it’s not climate change, per se, that has made them so forceful. It’s lack of fuel resulting from the war in Ukraine. Nonetheless, they’ve moved quickly on some things that were already in the pipeline: scaling back coal, ramping up solar and wind power and trying to reduce fossil fuel consumption generally.
We bounced around Germany – and all city public transport – on a monthly ticket you can purchase for 9 Euros. It puts you on any subway, elevated, tram, bus or regional train service to literally anywhere you want to go. Even the German airline, instead of simply giving out tickets when a domestic flight is canceled, offers a high-speed rail ticket to that location. All of this is to get folks out of cars and into more efficient means of transport, reducing the overall consumption of carbon fuel. It’s simply practical policy, and hugely popular. Overall, the EU hopes to reduce carbon emissions by 55% by 2030.
Europe is a tiny place, in the end. Industrial Germany itself is sixth in its emissions of greenhouse gases; China leads the way with nearly 10 billion metric tons; followed by the U.S., with about 5 billion. We do not have the kind of infrastructure that would allow us to do as Germany has done, but the truly pathetic thing is that there seems to be no planning for reduction at all.
Florida is in particularly unenviable shape: We have no real public transport — certainly not long distance — despite our weekend tripping down to Disney, to the beaches and to the parks. We need our cars and agriculture, and doing without AC would be ludicrous.
We talk about rail once in a while, when the Rays aren’t playing and gas prices are killing bank accounts, as well as toxifying the environment.
We have simply got to become more serious about the priority ranking of this crisis.
What’s the plan, Tallahassee? Perhaps our best bet is harnessing the hot air coming from the politicians themselves.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics at Florida Southern College and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Hot air out of Tallahassee won't do a thing for Florida's climate
