Given that I devoted last week’s column to the dangerous lack of urgency the Democratic leadership and the US legacy media are showing on the problem of climate change, I suppose it makes sense to check in on Florida this week.
I realise that in this column I have written more about Florida than any other American state, and indeed far more than I ever intended or wanted to. But it seems there’s just no avoiding Florida. I’m reminded of the time in 2015 I went to lease a car in Tampa, where I spent three years teaching at the University of South Florida, and the frankly obnoxious sales associate told me: “Tampa is like a fungus. You can leave, but you always come back.”
Leaving aside the point that this classic Florida Man reasoning would make “you” the fungus and Tampa the host, Florida itself, if not specifically Tampa, has always had a way of looming larger than life in the American imagination. And these days, Florida is not only a laboratory for the radicalised American right but also, because of its peculiar geography at the far end of the southeast coast, one of the handful of American states most directly affected by climate change. And that fact is causing problems for the so-called Sunshine State.
