By Jon Ullman
On a hot July day in Miami in 2007, Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist announced that the Sunshine State would adopt California Clean Car standards.
This meant Floridian’s cars would go farther on a gallon of gas than those in most of the nation. Crist and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger celebrated the announcement by holding up paintings of melting polar ice caps. The great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt was there too, representing Republicans’ green legacy. “We have proven that Republicans can, in fact, protect the environment,” said a beaming Schwarzenegger.
I went to Tallahassee to support the rule change for the Sierra Club. Anti-environment powerhouses, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida were mum. This could pass, I thought.
Then, Toyota, maker of the newly released Prius hatchback -- the car that would save the world from climate change -- objected. Within days, it was dead.
By now you know what happened to Florida. The moderate Republicans were rooted out. The far-right took power. And things went crazy.
But what must be said is that Florida was a place where green Republicans existed. They were an indispensable part of a coalition of Democrats and Independents that protected the Everglades and made offshore oil drilling non-existent. It even passed a constitutional amendment in 2018 that banned off-shore drilling in Florida’s state waters.
They believed in nature. They believed in climate change. They were card-carrying Sierra Club members. Today, many think they are an endangered species.
California too has felt the hard-right shift.
In Ventura County, a Republican pro-oil majority now controls the government.
Santa Barbara County will join Ventura in this shift if a swing-vote incumbent loses this March.
Don’t expect Democrats alone to save the environment either. In the California legislature, except for standout environmentalists like Greg Hart, Monica Limon and Steve Bennett, the majority of Democrats vote for oil and gas. They set far off goals, but fail to take real carbon-cutting action.
Often seen as the foil to the climate denying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Gov. Gavin Newsom received a C-grade from Sierra Club California while his appointees at the Public Utilities Commission effectively kneecapped rooftop solar. Inexplicably, DeSantis vetoed anti-rooftop legislation.
A few weeks ago, the so-called “moderate” presidential candidate Nikki Haley accused DeSantis of being an environmentalist, a now top crime in Republican-land. He immediately denied it. Again, he’s not an environmentalist, but he’s done some things that environmentalists wanted that happened to align with things he wanted.
The point of all this is to say, the Republican party has successfully branded itself as anti-environmental even though a good chunk of Republican voters care about the environment. Remember those Florida green Republicans I talked about. They didn’t go anywhere. They’ve just been conditioned by the polarization of party politics. They still support clean air and water for humans, plants and critters. That desire has been repressed, internalized, defused.
We can bring them back! In fact, we must bring them back. As long as there are two parties, there MUST be Republican environmental supporters. We cannot win with Democrat support alone, and even that is not where it should be.
But can’t we just ignore the Republicans or lure the moderates to the Democratic side. That would not only doom the environment, but it would also doom democracy. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups should reach out to moderate Republicans and Independents.
We should tap into the love of the environment – a value Americans share. This value didn’t go away but has been overshadowed by partisan politics. We need to find commonalities. In the past, 20 percent of Sierra Club members were Republicans. It was a minority, but an important one.
We can’t win without them.