Now that Cuban migration into Miami has slowed, the city’s Republican legislators have pretty much decided that they hate refugees. State Rep. Carlos Trujillo in 2016 tried to give Gov. Rick Scott military power to police which refugees enter the country.
Since 2016, Florida Power and Light, the monopoly consumers are forced to pay if they want electricity in Miami, has been accused of the following: Leaking radioactive wastewater into Biscayne Bay; trying to trick consumers into giving up their rights to solar power; attempting to stash radioactive waste in an…
If it comes to fruition, American Dream Miami would be one of the largest malls in the nation. The $3 billion project is the definition of South Florida largesse: In addition to offering the standard list of luxury shops, American Dream would include an ice rink, a lake for submarine rides, a water park, a theme park, and an indoor ski slope.
About 1,000 people have already registered for Miami’s March for Science.
At the beginning of North Miami Beach’s meeting last night about a plan to privatize its water system, City Manager Ana Garcia asked residents to trust the city based on the commission’s track record. That was an odd appeal, considering that Mayor George Vallejo is the subject of an…
Floatopia-style parties — where attendees bring inflatable rafts and get hellaciously drunk on the ocean — would be totally fine if people just cleaned up after themselves. But instead, partygoers have treated the ocean like an open garbage can and left beer cans, food wrappers, loose garbage, and all sorts of marine-life-killing flotsam drifting in the current.
Public utilities never quite work great. They function without (typically) poisoning people, but they’re almost always wrapped in red tape and slathered in layers of needless bureaucracy. But lately, right-leaning politicians have loved to harp that selling off publicly owned water, sewer, or power grids to private companies will somehow cut costs and public waste.
The folks who support fracking or nuclear energy need to distract people, so they call their dirty, carbon-emitting industries “job-creators,” and accuse green-energy advocates of being “job-killers.” But that’s all bunk. Study after study has shown recently that solar energy is getting cheap. Scores of workers have been hired to make…
The history of Florida is the adjustment to intrusion. In the state’s short 172-year history, armed U.S. troops have chased native Seminoles out of the Everglades, pristine beaches once considered worthless land have become vacation hot spots, and cattle pastures have given way to Disney World food courts.
Ignore the fact that the FBI has probed the City of North Miami Beach’s proposal to hand the operation of its entire water system over to a private company, and brush aside that the third-ranked company bidding for the project, the French firm Veolia, has ties to lead crises in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Flint, Michigan.
Federal and state authorities probed North Miami Beach’s pending deal to potentially privatize its water system, North Miami Beach City Attorney Jose Smith said Thursday. “They found no wrongdoing,” he added.
Having a hand in catastrophic lead crises in multiple American cities should probably disqualify a company from ever controlling a public water utility. But that has not stopped North Miami Beach from negotiating to potentially hand its water services over to Veolia, a private company tied to the two largest drinking-water crises in America: the catastrophes in Flint, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Climate change is already making life more difficult in South Florida, and the signs remain ever more ominous that it will get worse. Just this week, scientists found that the Gulf of Mexico is freakishly hot for the tail end of winter — which could fuel monster hurricanes…
On February 24, Florida Power & Light — Miami’s electricity monopoly and the single biggest donor to politicians in Florida — lost a court battle with the Miami, South Miami, Pinecrest, and Miami-Dade governments over whether the company could string power lines from massive, 80-to-150-foot towers through South Miami-Dade County.
Because good climate-change news is about as common in Florida as a calm and pleasant rush-hour drive on I-95, let’s start there first: The vast majority of the Sunshine State now believes global warming is a real phenomenon supported by scientific evidence. That’s great! But this is Florida, so you know there’s a Lake Okeechobee-size “but” hanging at the end of that first sentence.
Sea-level rise has become such a problem in Miami-Dade that even Republican leaders admit the issue is real. “It’s not a theory,” county Mayor Carlos Gimenez said of global warming in January. “It’s a fact. We live it every day.” For once, we wish Gimenez had spent more time hanging out with his old golf buddy Donald Trump.
It’s no secret that it’s best not to live near one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund sites. They’re the most polluted places in America. But those sites also tend to be crammed near low-income communities and communities of color that don’t live there by choice.
Donald Trump might in fact hate brown and Latino people so much that he’s now hellbent on unleashing a record-breaking hurricane on South Florida, some sort of biblical wall of water that can carry “criminals” and “rapists” and Jorge Ramos and everything else Trump can’t stand about Miami into the sea. There’s no other way to explain his recent actions this week: According to multiple memos leaked to the Washington Post, the president is gunning to juice up the hurricanes that hit Miami.
Last month, a judge upheld Coral Gables’ ban on Styrofoam products, finding that a state law barring the city from enforcing the ordinance was unconstitutional. Now some city officials want to take on another notorious pollutant: plastic bags.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The State of Florida is nearly ready to approve a major project from Florida Power & Light, but environmentalists are adamant that it could irreparably harm the Everglades. There are so many scandals swirling around FPL’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station…
In South Florida, the regulated monopoly of Florida Power & Light is the only game in town when it comes to keeping your lights on. That means that despite FPL’s history of jacking up rates, fighting to store radioactive waste beneath our aquifer, and spending $8 million on a deceitful anti-solar amendment, consumers basically have no other choice but to patronize the utility giant.
For now, Donald Trump can dismiss New York Times reports about his incompetence as “fake” and get away with it, because without knowing who’s leaking White House information, Americans will always have a sliver of doubt about whether Trump’s administration can really have become such a deranged Tilt-a-Whirl.
