The term “climate change” is reportedly banned in Florida
Gov. Rick Scott's anti-science policy reaches a new low
As rising seas lap at its shore, Florida’s come up with a fool-proof plan for dealing with climate change: an official policy of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
For officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the agency ostensibly in charge in studying and preparing for the impacts of climate change, the term “climate change” itself, along with its counterpart ”global warming,” is reportedly verboten. That’s according to a damning new report from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, published this weekend in the Miami Herald.
Former DEP employees claim they were told never to use either of those terms “in any official communications, emails or reports,” because, said former Miami-based employee Kristina Trotta, “We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact.”
The rationale sounds awfully familiar to Gov. Rick “I’m not a scientist” Scott, who refused to acknowledge the reality of man-made climate change even after a group of Florida scientists sat him down and explained it to him. According to the report, in fact, the climate change ban went into effect after Scott took office in 2011. Neither of the men who served as DEP director during Scott’s time in office would comment for the article; the department’s press secretary, Tiffany Cowie, denied the existence of any such policy.
While there may not have been an official ban on the books, however, the report’s sources say the spoken policy was widely communicated throughout the state — they also say they were warned that, should they use the forbidden terms, it would bring “unwanted attention” to their projects. More tha just an annoyance, they claim it negatively affected their ability to do their jobs. “We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change,” one anonymous source said, “and yet we can’t reference it.” In one emblematic example, nature writer Jim Harper describes the Monty Python-esque experience of attempting to write a report on coral reef protection in 2013:
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