Rubio Springs Into Climate Action By . . Pushing Bill To Allow Sand Imports For Vanishing FL Beaches

[hatrack]

EDIT

Since the 1950s Florida authorities have spent $1.3bn “nourishing” the beaches – periodically buying in supplementary sand. Despite a huge effort, nearly half the state’s 825 miles of beaches are now considered “critically eroded”. And complications abound amid not just a local or US but a worldwide shortage of sand. Dredging and mining sand offshore causes environmental damage to the ocean floor, as does repairing the beach itself. In Florida, turtle nesting season has to be worked around, but smaller creatures just suffocate.

EDIT

Some want to dig for supplies overseas. The Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio last month reintroduced a bill that’s failed before, calling for a way around federal laws banning the import of sand, so that his state could go shopping with public funds for gorgeous, cheap sand from the Bahamas less than 100 miles east of Florida’s Atlantic coast.

He is arguing there’s an especially acute need because early September’s Hurricane Dorian damaged some Florida beaches.

The double irony is that, first, the damage happened even though the storm didn’t make landfall in the state, instead wreaking destruction in parts of the Bahamas, and second, climate experts point out that such storms are being exacerbated by global heating, whereas Rubio only recently began softening slightly on his long-held, hardline denials of a human-caused climate emergency.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/25/surfside-florida-beaches-climate-crisis-sea-levels

[riversedge]

1. gotta keep the commercial resorts open is the only mentality

[JDC]

2. There is a "Brings Sand to the Beach" joke in there somewhere

[bronxiteforever]

3. No beach will hold back the ocean. Just pissing into the wind.

And it will taxpayer money being pissed away.

[hatrack]

4. Yes, but next quarter's profits! The. Only. Thing. That. Matters.

.

[bronxiteforever]

5. +1