Sticking Our Heads in the Increasingly Warm Sand

Earlier this year, Florida lawmakers once again considered changing our state bird. For more than 100 years, it has been the northern mockingbird, but lawmakers thought the flamingo or the scrub jay might better represent whatever it is a state bird is meant to signify. I have a better idea. Let’s make it the ostrich, symbolizing our leaders' penchant for sticking their collective heads in the sand whenever the inconvenient truth of climate change is presented.

Ostriches don’t actually bury their heads in the sand, of course. The misconception is said to have originated with the first-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, who described an ostrich hiding its head in the bushes to appear invisible. An ostrich will, however, lie flat and attempt to blend in with its environment when it feels that using its speed to escape is futile. This and their habit of digging shallow holes for their eggs is probably where the cliche originated, but it has likely stuck precisely because it is such a common human attribute.

Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation removing references to "climate change" from state laws while deprioritizing climate considerations in energy policy. This codified an unwritten policy created under his predecessor, now-Senator Rick Scott, that effectively banned state employees, particularly those within the Department of Environmental Protection, from using terms such as "climate change," "global warming," and "sustainability" in official communications, emails, reports, and documents.

Mother Nature remains nonplussed. One week ago today, Tampa recorded its highest temperature on record, one of dozens of record-setting days that have occurred all over the United States this summer. The surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is close to 90 degrees and has been averaging 126% of the average temperature for the date over this summer. The United States and Canada continue to experience record-breaking wildfires.

The world is literally on fire, and Republicans are acting as though they have finally proven that climate change is a myth and are rescuing us from the follies of attempting to abate its worst-case outcomes. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it plans to repeal its landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a public threat.

The so-called "endangerment finding" serves as the legal basis for a range of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act. Rescinding it is a signal to our dirtiest industries that they no longer even have to pretend to be interested in making any sacrifices to their bottom line for the sake of not cooking the earth. Meanwhile, try to schedule an HVAC appointment in Florida, where technicians say they are working overtime to educate consumers as to why their units simply cannot cool the air to a desirable temperature. Or, try shopping your astronomical property insurance policy and see if you can find a better deal.

Those two industries appear to be among the few that are clear-eyed about the realities of a rapidly warming planet and the hell on earth that comes with it. Meanwhile, the space race for artificial general intelligence has been creating the most significant demand for increased energy in human history, including the dawn of the industrial age. ChatGPT alone receives around 1.5 billion visitors monthly, consuming approximately 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) daily, which is roughly equivalent to the daily energy consumption of around 33,000 US households.

That doesn’t even consider the amount of energy required to train these large language models before they are user-ready. As the technology continues to develop, its energy needs continue to expand almost exponentially, with the computational power needed for AI doubling approximately every 100 days. In a $16 billion deal between owner Constellation Energy and Microsoft to power the latter’s AI data centers, previously defunct Pennsylvania nuclear plant Three Mile Island will soon be back online.

Such historic demand for energy should incentivize an all-hands-on-deck approach to our energy portfolio. However, the Trump administration eliminated nearly every incentive for developing renewables (our fastest-growing energy sector) in this year’s budget because renewable energy equals woke, or something. As temperatures continue to rise, and overworked energy grids result in rolling blackouts and other inconveniences, I doubt anyone will be comforted by the fact that at least their air conditioning unit is not powered by green energy.

Most of all, our refusal to address climate change is just one more way in which a generation of older Americans is extracting present wealth at the expense of future generations, who will already be saddled with the cost of having run decades of deficits rather than paying the bill when it is delivered to the table. What’s that? No more social safety net because it’s all being spent on interest payments for a bunch of dead folks who lived high on the hog decades ago? Sorry, I guess you’ll just have to figure out how to deal with a cooked planet without that thing we used to call money.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.