Step aside Donald Trump -- there’s a new presidential candidate ready to deny the climate crisis and spread misinformation. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who recently announced his bid for the White House, began a media tour in the US. In the tour, he pushes a long list of misconceptions about human-caused climate change and flat-out anti-science propaganda.
Out-Trumping Trump
DeSantis spoke with former congressman Trey Gowdy, a conservative Republican and also a climate denier, in a recent interview with Fox News. Gowdy said Florida had recently experienced “a number of hurricanes” and then asked the governor for his views on climate change. DeSantis said hurricanes haven’t increased in numbers.
“People try to say when we had Ian that it was because of climate change. But if you look at the first 60 years, from 1900 to 1960, we had more major hurricanes hit Florida than in the 60 years since then,” DeSantis said in his reply. “This is something that’s a fact of life in the Sunshine State. I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
Hurricanes are tropical cyclones that happen in bodies of water. While it’s not clear yet whether a warming world will lead to more or fewer hurricanes, climate scientists largely agree that climate change will make then wetter and more intense. A 2021 review found further warming will lead to a larger proportion of severe hurricanes.
Florida was hit by Hurricane Ian last year, which caused widespread damage and over 100 deaths. DeSantis is right to say that it’s incorrect to say that the hurricane was caused by climate change. But instead of causing extreme weather events, climate change makes them more likely or worse, as the website FactCheck.org explains. So DeSantis is tweaking the argument and only looking at what he wants to.
Climate scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that climate change worsened Hurricane Ian’s extreme rainfall by around 10%. Speaking with The Guardian, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said DeSantis is engaged in the polarization of weather by denying basic climate science.
This is hardly surprising.
A long record of climate denial
DeSantis recently published a new autobiography that offers a glimpse into his views on the environment. In the book, The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis says “Democrats largely ignored issues that had a direct effect on people’s ability to enjoy the natural environment, such as the quality of the water, in favor of alarmism about global warming.”
During his time in office in Florida, he adopted legislation blocking cities from adopting 100% clean energy as those goals “discriminate” against fossil fuels. He also adopted measures to ban the state’s pension fund from making investment decisions that consider the climate crisis, claiming there’s a corporate attempt to “impose an ideological agenda.”
But it doesn’t end there. During his elections to Congress, DeSantis took over $1 million in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, The Guardian reported. His campaign committee also got $2 million last year from Club for Growth, a conservative lobby group that asked for the US to withdraw from the climate Paris Agreement when Trump was in office.
DeSantis is competing with Trump to be the Republican candidate for the US elections next year. After a government openly questioning climate science, Trump now made no mention of climate change in his 2024 announcement speech. Instead, he talked about energy policy and “energy dominance” to question that Biden is driving up energy costs.
