In Florida Senate Race, Two Candidates With Vastly Different Views on the Climate

ORLANDO, Fla. —Florida’s narrowing Senate race, between two candidates with vastly different views on the environment and climate, is shaping up to be consequential as each party pursues control of the chamber in November.

The incumbent, Rick Scott, a Republican, faces a formidable challenge from former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat. Various recent polls indicate the contest is tightening. In one poll last month Scott led Mucarsel-Powell by a mere percentage point. Forty-five percent of would-be voters favored Scott, compared with 44 percent for Mucarsel-Powell, according to the Sept. 30 poll from Victory Insights. Eleven percent were undecided.

At stake is U.S. climate policy including the Inflation Reduction Act, the $370 billion package President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. The monumental measure includes clean energy incentives that former President Donald Trump has vowed to repeal if re-elected.

“Florida could be decisive in helping to decide control of the U.S. Senate,” said Aubrey Jewett, associate director of the School of Politics, Security and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida and a co-author of the book Politics in Florida.

Even if Republicans do not win the presidency, “if they can win Florida they’re at 50, and then they just need to win one of the other competitive states,” he said. “For Democrats, if they could somehow get that upset in Florida, they would actually still have a chance of keeping control of the Senate.” 

Florida in recent years has leaned red. Voters here in 2022 resoundingly re-elected Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a potential frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. Republicans hold every statewide elected office, control the legislature and boast 1 million more voter registrations than Democrats. But for many years Florida was a must-win swing state, opting six times in a row for the prevailing presidential candidate, from Bill Clinton in 1996 to Trump in 2016. For much of the 20th century, Democrats ruled the state.

Scott is accustomed to close races and has shown a willingness to spend his own fortune to win. A former hospital company executive, he was elected governor in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate, upsetting then-Attorney General Bill McCollum in the GOP primary before narrowly defeating Democrat Alex Sink. Scott was re-elected in 2014.

While leading the state, Scott focused on jobs and transformed Florida’s policy on the environment and climate. He gutted environmental efforts such as Florida Forever, the state’s land conservation program, and dismantled the Department of Community Affairs, eliminating state oversight of local planning decisions. Most notably he reportedly banned Department of Environmental Protection staffers from using the words “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications or reports, making him a punchline of late-night comedians.

“Scott really seemed not to do much to help the environment and instead seemed to go out of his way to do things to hurt the environment,” Jewett said. “He was just so focused on economic development, it was to the exclusion of everything else.”

When asked about his views on the climate, Scott was known to say he was “not a scientist,” prompting a group of climate scientists to reach out in 2014 for a meeting. Among them was Jeff Chanton, professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University. Scott granted the meeting, and Chanton made a presentation about the human role in the planet’s warming. The presentation did not appear to influence the governor, Chanton said.

“I cannot say that I observed any such effects,” Chanton told Inside Climate News. “I think he’s kind of in denial about the effects that climate change are going to have on the economy and the well-being of the United States and Florida. And I would say that is pretty short-sighted because Florida is one of the more vulnerable states in the country to climate change.”

“Scott really seemed not to do much to help the environment and instead seemed to go out of his way to do things to hurt the environment.”

— Aubrey Jewett, School of Politics, Security and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida

Scott was elected to the Senate in 2018 and voted with fellow Republicans against the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. He also voted in favor of an amendment to the IRA to strike funding for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, said Javier Estevez, acting political director at the Sierra Club in Florida, which endorsed Mucarsel-Powell.

“Scott has continued his horrible record against the environment in the Senate,” Estevez said. “He has voted against almost every single bit of legislation that addresses climate change or clean energy initiatives like the Build Back Better Act and the IRA. He voted against the appointments of the Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Interior and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, all because they were appointed by President Biden.”

Scott’s views on the climate may be evolving, however, after Hurricane Helene pummeled Florida’s Big Bend region in September as a category 4 storm before causing widespread devastation across the Southeast. During an interview with CNN, while touring the destruction in Florida, Scott acknowledged, “Absolutely something is changing.”

“The climate is clearly changing,” he said. “And when I was governor I spent a whole bunch of money on resiliency, sea level rise issues and beach renourishment issues and trying to make our state more resilient. So what we’ve got to do, we know things are changing. We’ve got to figure out, how do we react to that? And so in the short term, today what I’m doing is I’m traveling the state, talking to sheriffs, talking to first responders, doing everything I can to keep people safe. And then what we’re going to do is, we’re going to figure out how to rebuild more resiliently.”

Mucarsel-Powell also has vowed that if elected she would pursue funding for climate-resilient infrastructure in Florida.

Mary Anna Mancuso, a political strategist and spokeswoman for republicEn, a group supporting conservative climate leadership, said Republicans in Florida, including Scott, have an opportunity to do more on the climate. Neither the Scott campaign nor the Republican Party of Florida responded to multiple requests for comment.

“He’s always been really quick when disaster has hit Florida to step up and do something,” she said. “As Floridians what we want to see, we want to see our elected leaders in the state work for mitigation and get ahead of those things so we don’t have to wait.” 

Mucarsel-Powell was elected to represent Florida’s 26th district in the House in 2018, although she was defeated in her bid for re-election two years later by Rep. Carlos Giménez. A former administrator at Florida International University, she lived in California and then Miami after emigrating from Ecuador with her mother and sisters.

While in Congress, Mucarsel-Powell helped bring $200 million to the state for Everglades restoration and also worked on environmental issues such as protecting water quality and coral reefs. She told Inside Climate News she is especially concerned about communities that are struggling to endure sea level rise and other climate impacts. Government can help by offering property owners buy-outs, to help them relocate to less risky areas, she said.

“There are certain communities that are not going to be able to build back. Low-lying areas where they just will not be able to withstand the high levels of sea level rise that we are seeing,” she said. “These are families that have been living in the same house for decades. So I think that’s one of the most alarming, alarming situations that we are facing.”

Floridians are more likely than other Americans to believe climate change is happening and support government actions to address it, surveys show. One recent survey from Florida Atlantic University found that 90 percent of respondents believed climate change was real, compared with 70 percent of Americans who answered similarly on a separate Yale University survey.

That may be because Florida is uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, especially hotter temperatures, rising seas and more damaging storms. In the last seven years the state has weathered six major hurricanes. Michael, which made landfall in 2018 in the Panhandle, was the first category 5 storm to strike the continental United States since Andrew in 1992. Ian, which hit southwest Florida in 2022, was the costliest hurricane in state history and third-costliest on record nationwide after Katrina in 2005 and Harvey in 2017. It will be some time before the scope of Helene’s impact is fully understood. This week the state braced for Milton, predicted to hit the peninsula’s Gulf coast. Recent major hurricanes also include Irma in 2017 and Idalia in 2023.

“Climate policy is important to Florida. We’re the canary in the coal mine, and we’re the most sensitive to rises in sea level and hurricanes,” Chanton said. “This is not just a Florida issue. The whole Gulf Coast is sensitive to this, and the whole Atlantic Coast is sensitive to this.”