Ron DeSantis will not meet Joe Biden on Saturday when the president comes to Florida to survey damage from Hurricane Idalia, the governor's administration said Friday.
The governor’s office, in a statement, said the visit will disrupt recovery efforts.
“We don’t have any plans for the Governor to meet with the President tomorrow,” said Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis’ spokesperson, in a statement. “In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts.”
The two rivals and political enemies were expected to meet on Saturday to jointly survey damage from Hurricane Idalia, a devastating storm that struck Florida earlier this week and left more than 6,000 homes damaged and at least one person dead.
DeSantis and Biden previously appeared together and projected unity after almost 100 people were killed in a terrifying condo collapse north of Miami Beach in 2021, and they worked together last year after Hurricane Ian demolished seaside communities along Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Senior White House officials said recently it was important for the president to speak with DeSantis after a 21-year-old white man killed three Black Floridians in a racially motivated Jacksonville shooting last week and, again, in the aftermath of the latest hurricane so Biden could offer federal support.
Yet in a sign of how quickly the trip was put together, Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott was still waiting on details on Biden’s visit less than 24 hours before the trip.
The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.
DeSantis, during a Friday morning press conference, also said he warned Biden by phone that Saturday’s trip could be “very disruptive” to some of the hardest hit communities because the White House’s “whole security apparatus” could congest roadways in the rural areas.
The hurricane made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Wednesday near Keaton Beach on the Gulf Coast. The area is one of the most rural regions in Florida far away from major cities.
Biden and DeSantis signaled a willingness to put aside politics before Saturday’s visit. On Thursday, Biden joked that he’s spoken so frequently with DeSantis about the storm response that “there should be a direct dial, the two of us — Gov. DeSantis and I.” Biden also approved a major disaster declaration for Florida and sent Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to the state Thursday.
“I think [DeSantis] trusts my judgment and my desire to help, and I trust him to be able to suggest that this is not about politics, this is about taking care of the people of his state,” Biden said earlier this week.
For his part, DeSantis said this week that helping people affected by Idalia is a top priority. “That has got to triumph over any type of short-term political calculation or any type of positioning,” he said. He also toured damaged areas with Criswell.
DeSantis frequently rails against Biden’s policies on immigration, LGBTQ issues, the economy and pandemic policies. He has sued the administration numerous times, including over border policies, university accreditation and for failing to approve a measure that would allow Florida to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada.
On the Republican presidential debate stage on Aug. 23, the governor portrayed Biden as a useless leader relegated to his basement. He called out the president for what he said was an insufficient, tone-deaf response to the Maui wildfires.
"As somebody that's handled disasters in Florida, you've got to be activated,” he said. “You've got to be there. You've got to be present.”
Biden and his administration also doesn’t shy away from criticizing DeSantis. In recent months, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a more public role in attacking the governor. Harris skewered DeSantis over Florida’s 6-week abortion ban — which the governor signed into law — and criticized him after he defended a middle-school curriculum that would instruct students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Speaking in Orlando at the African Methodist Episcopal church in August, Harris said “there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”
Adam Cancryn contributed to this story.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he'd blame House Republicans for any government shutdown if they fail to pass spending legislation by the end of the month.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent Friday morning, Schumer sought to drive a wedge between House and Senate Republicans — offering praise for both Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and ranking Republican Susan Collins (R-Maine), a lawmaker with whom Schumer is often at loggerheads.
“We cannot afford the brinkmanship or hostage-taking we saw from House Republicans earlier this year when they pushed our country to the brink of default to appease the most extreme members of their party,” Schumer wrote.
The chamber passed all 12 appropriations bills out of committee on a bipartisan basis, he boasts. That drew an implicit contrast to the House, where Speaker Kevin McCarthy has broken faith on his spending caps deal with President Joe Biden, and is instead pushing partisan proposals that don’t have a prayer of becoming law.
“The only way to avoid a shutdown is through bipartisanship, so I have urged House Republican leadership to follow the Senate’s lead and pass bipartisan appropriations bills,” the majority leader continued.
Schumer’s letter comes just a day after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell underscored the need for bipartisanship to keep the government open in a Kentucky speech that was quickly overshadowed by the Republican’s health scare.
“The speaker and the president reached an agreement, which I supported, in connection with raising the debt ceiling, to set the spending levels for next year,” McConnell said. “The House then turned around and passed spending levels that were below that level. … [T]hat’s not going to be replicated in the Senate.”
It's been a summer of norm-shattering extremes — with temperatures beyond human memory, catastrophic floods from Beijing to Vermont, choking wildfires and climate records tumbling on every continent.
Welcome to the rest of our lives.
To the scientists studying the planet’s warming, this season of heat deaths, burn-inducing sidewalks and coast-to-coast tropical cyclones is just a sign of the havoc to come as humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The weather extremes are costly, deadly and probably coming faster and faster — but, perhaps even more worrying, they should not come as a surprise.
“There’s not a ‘weird’ acceleration happening” in the Earth’s climate, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a scientist at Stanford University. “There’s an expected acceleration happening.”
The impacts have crept into the corners of everyday human life, costing the U.S. tens of billions of dollars already this season, according to a recent report by NOAA. The country has seen more disasters with damages totaling at least $1 billion than in any other year since NOAA first started keeping track in 1980.
It’s not an illusion that things are getting weird, some scientists say.
“Very rare things are happening more often,” said Erich Fischer, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who specializes in climate and weather extremes. “Unprecedented things are occurring, which by itself is a sign.”
The summer’s drama included Canada erupting in flames in its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 37 million acres of land burned to date. Eastern Canada, typically more temperate and less flammable than the western provinces, took the brunt of the blazes after an abnormally hot, dry spring.
The northeastern United States got a rare taste of wildfire haze as smoke drifted south over the Eastern Seaboard, with New York City and Washington experiencing their worst air quality in history.
The U.S., meanwhile, saw its deadliest wildfires in at least a century — not in California, but in balmy Hawaii, where a conflagration consumed the historic town of Lahaina in Maui, displacing thousands and killing more than 100 people.
Across the Atlantic, blazing infernos in Greece became the biggest wildfires ever recorded in Europe.
Weeks of torrential rains caused disastrous floods in Beijing, killing dozens of people. The Chinese city recorded nearly 30 inches of rain in a matter of days, its heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years, according to the Beijing Meteorological Bureau.
Deadly floods and devastating landslides killed dozens as record-breaking monsoon rains pounded northern India.
East Africa is still struggling in the grip of a yearslong drought, its worst in at least 40 years. A recent study found that the “exceptional event” likely would not have been possible at all without the influence of human-caused climate change.
Tropical cyclones struck both U.S. coasts in a rare series of events. Tropical Storm Hilary moved into California after making landfall in northern Mexico, becoming the first named storm to strike the state in 26 years. Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Idalia slammed Florida’s western coast as a Category 3 storm after rapidly intensifying in record-warm Gulf waters.
And all summer long, much of the world sweltered under blistering heat.
Global ocean temperatures reached their hottest levels on record in a summer of staggering marine heat. July went down as Earth’s hottest month in recorded history, while new temperature milestones sprang up across the globe.
Tunis, Tunisia, recorded an all-time high of more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Beijing saw 27 consecutive days above 95 F for the first time ever. In the U.S., Death Valley logged the world’s hottest midnight temperature at 120 F.
And Phoenix, the hottest city in the U.S., experienced 31 consecutive days with temperatures topping 110 F. Doctors reported an alarming spike in the number of patients suffering third-degree burns from asphalt and pavement, while Maricopa County has confirmed dozens of heat-related deaths this summer.
Not even the Southern Hemisphere, in the midst of its winter, escaped the heat. Australia saw dozens of local temperature records topple during an unseasonably warm July. And South America saw some of its warmest winter temperatures ever.
“South America is living one of the extreme events the world has ever seen,” tweeted climate historian Maximiliano Herrera as the heat wave unfolded. “This event is rewriting all climatic books.”
The surge of extremes even entered the Republican primary debate last week, when moderators referenced the devastating Maui wildfires and unusual behavior of Tropical Storm Hilary to ask candidates about their views on climate change.
“The climate change agenda is a hoax,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy responded.
The crumbling climate records are a matter of simple statistics, said Diffenbaugh, the Stanford researcher.
In the Earth’s former preindustrial climate — before humans began rampantly burning fossil fuels — the most extreme weather events were outliers. On a graph, they’d lie at the tail end of the chart.
But as the climate warms, those extremes are no longer outliers. They move into the main body of the graph. And the more the climate warms, the faster they shift.
Meanwhile, new outliers start appearing. Record-breaking events happen more often, and never-before-seen disasters begin to strike.
Eventually, some places may permanently shift into a new climate range entirely, Diffenbaugh said. With a couple degrees of warming, for instance, research suggests that parts of the globe may shift into a new climate in which “even the coolest summer that they experience is hotter than the hottest summer of, say, the second half of the 20th century,” Diffenbaugh said.
Even without the influence of human-caused climate change, the planet is a messy, noisy place with a lot of natural ups and downs in the weather. Sometimes record-breaking events occur by mere chance.
But as the planet moves further and further into uncharted territory, the climate change signal eventually becomes stronger than any natural ups and downs.
“So far, today, we clearly haven’t seen anything close to what’s possible in today’s climate — let alone what’s possible in the near future,” said Fischer, the Swiss researcher.
The increase in climate disasters is no surprise to scientists. Climate models have predicted for decades that extreme weather events would worsen as the planet warmed.
But predicting individual events in specific locations — with enough time for human communities to prepare for them — is another story. Climate models, which often focus on long-term global patterns, aren’t good at making granular predictions about unique disasters.
That’s where weather models come in. They can produce accurate projections about two weeks in advance. They’ve provided short-term warnings about all kinds of jaw-dropping extremes in recent years, including many of the events of this summer. These forecasts give officials a few days to warn the public, issue advice and call for evacuations if necessary.
But scientists dream about one day having it all: models that can predict individual extremes with months or even years of advance notice. This would give policymakers time to not only warn the public but design detailed response plans and build the kinds of resilient infrastructure necessary to protect their communities.
It may one day be possible, Fischer said.
“The challenge is really that we’re looking to try and estimate something that we haven’t observed," he said.
In a recent study, Fischer and colleagues explored the question of whether science could have possibly predicted the unprecedented 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, which killed more than 150 people. Is it possible to build models that could see those kinds of extremes much further in advance?
“The conclusion from my paper was yes, in principle, it’s possible,” Fischer said. “But it’s a very challenging thing.”
One strategy is to try and design modeling systems that can quantify the worst-case weather scenario for any given location. These models might not be able to predict the exact temperatures on a specific date, but they could inform scientists about the worst heat or heaviest rainfall a city could possibly experience in the current or future climate. Then policymakers could plan for the worst disasters that might come.
It’s a difficult challenge. Models make their projections in part by relying on historical data about the Earth’s climate system. That makes it hard to tease out events that have no historical precedent — events that are part of the new climate.
“The challenge is really that we’re looking to try and estimate something that we haven’t observed,” Fischer said. “Trying to get something out of our models that we can’t directly evaluate because it hasn’t happened in the past.”
As scientists work to improve their forecasts, experts say society must prepare for a future filled with previously unimaginable extremes.
That means communities must take steps to identify and protect their most vulnerable populations, said Kristie Ebi, an expert on climate change and public health at the University of Washington. A variety of factors, including income levels, access to resources, and exposure to pollution and other environmental hazards can make some communities more sensitive to the impacts of extreme heat and other climate-related disasters than others.
Communities must also develop detailed emergency action plans and devise early warning systems, she said. That’s especially important when it comes to extreme heat.
The record-shattering events of recent years have helped highlight extreme heat as a deadly climate disaster, just as formidable as wildfires, floods or hurricanes. Heat is the top weather-related killer in the U.S., and studies suggest it likely contributes to thousands of excess deaths each year.
But there’s still more work to be done to raise awareness about the dangers, Ebi said.
“The more [information] we can get out so people understand that high temperatures are a risk, the better off we’re going to be,” she said.
Communities must also design resilient infrastructure that can stand up to the age of new extremes, said Diffenbaugh, of Stanford University.
In the past, infrastructure like roads and bridges were designed to withstand severe weather events using historical climate data. But that’s no longer appropriate as the Earth shifts into a new climate era. Policymakers must now make difficult decisions about what new extremes to plan for.
“It’s hard to plan for conditions that we haven't experienced,” Diffenbaugh said.
As communities are increasingly exposed to extremes they’re never encountered, they can benefit from turning to other, more experienced locations for advice, said Vikki Thompson, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who studies climate extremes.
There needs to be “a lot more looking around at other parts of the world and seeing what good preparations have happened before and what’s worked well,” she said. “A lot more joined-up thinking between different areas is needed for that.”
As of today, much of the world is not prepared for the record-breakers already happening around the globe, said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. But summers like this one — filled with apocalyptic climate disasters — have the potential to become a kind of “focusing event,” he said.
“It’s getting people’s attention on the fact that we have this climate adaptation deficit,” Kopp said. “If we made changes to be more resilient to the things we have already experienced this summer, that would do us a good job for more events in the future.”
A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Greenwire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.
President Joe Biden touted a solid monthly jobs report Friday, saying the country is in “one of the strongest job-creating periods” in its history while seeking to draw a contrast with the Trump administration.
American employers added 187,000 jobs in August, signaling that the labor market remains resilient even amid high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve as it seeks to tame inflation.
“People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces,” Biden said in remarks at the White House.
The unemployment rate ticked up last month, to 3.8 percent from 3.5 percent in July.
Biden sought to draw a contrast with former President Donald Trump, the leading GOP contender to face him in the 2024 general election, citing the pandemic-battered economy the previous administration left office with.
“It wasn’t that long ago that America was losing jobs,” Biden said. “In fact, my predecessor was one of only two presidents in history who entered his presidency and left with fewer jobs than when he entered.”
The job numbers come as central bank policymakers are weighing whether to raise interest rates again when they meet this month. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has signaled that the fight against inflation is not over and said the board remains committed to a 2 percent target, but many economists and liberal politicians have said further rate hikes aren’t necessary now.
Biden cited declines in inflation, which has fallen to 3.2 percent on an annualized basis from a peak of 9.1 percent last year.
“Some experts said to get inflation under control, we needed higher unemployment and lower wages,” Biden said. “But I’ve never thought that was the problem — too many people having a job or that working people were making too much money. Now, after months and months of bringing inflation down, while at the same time adding jobs and growing wages, it matters.”
He also promoted clean energy investments made under the Inflation Reduction Act, one of his administration’s signature laws, and a new Labor Department rule proposed this week that would make more workers eligible for overtime pay.
Ron DeSantis' handling of the hurricane this week showed why he's a darling of conservatives and the donor class — but also exposes his vulnerabilities.
DeSantis’ work ahead of the storm and during the relief efforts highlighted his command of the bureaucracy and ability to communicate complicated instructions to the masses in simple terms.
But it also foreshadowed potential fodder for his rivals, including scrutiny of Florida’s affordability problems.
Over the weekend and into this week, DeSantis temporarily left the campaign trail and canceled donor events to oversee his administration’s response to the hurricane, which made landfall as a Category 3 storm but didn’t cause massive damage on par with other recent natural disasters. At multiple press conferences, he laid out clear instructions about how Floridians could stay safe and receive help, while also urging vulnerable residents to evacuate some areas.
“This definitely helps him. Yesterday, there was nothing else on the news but this thing,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist based in New Hampshire. “Is this going to reset his campaign? No. But it will give him an opportunity to have something to talk about that was a success.”
“I’m sure nobody wishes to have a hurricane so they can polish their credibility, but he did well. He did as expected.”
DeSantis was in a similar situation of juggling a campaign and a natural disaster when he ran for reelection in 2022. After DeSantis managed that crisis, he boasted about his quick work restoring bridges while crisscrossing Florida.
DeSantis’ campaign on Thursday highlighted the swift actions the administration took in getting Floridians’ power restored, in clearing roads and deploying generators. “He is personally ensuring that Florida is serving the needs of those impacted,” DeSantis campaign communications director Andrew Romeo said in an email to reporters.
DeSantis returned to Florida to manage his state’s response just as his campaign seemed to level out after weeks of negative headlines that focused on his lagging poll numbers and a slew of campaign staff layoffs. Just last week, DeSantis came off a debate performance that secured him a surge in campaign donations and at least one poll that declared him the winner.
His storm management falls into a similar category, said Jason Osborne, a Mississippi-based Republican strategist.
“If you look at it like a debate performance, if he had screwed it up, it would have been disastrous and that would have been the story,” he said. “But he didn’t, and he did a great job, and it should be something he highlights.”
Doug Heye, former communications director of the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups, joked that DeSantis’ response this week can help his image — as long as the media isn’t “focusing on his boots,” a reference to images that went viral last year of DeSantis wearing knee-high white rubber boots while touring Hurricane Ian damage.
The circumstances allow DeSantis to show that “while he’s a cultural warrior, he’s also an adult who is working for the best interests of his state to get things done,” Heye said.
When asked about former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden, who is set to visit Florida on Saturday, the otherwise pugilistic governor has largely struck a collaborative tone that put politics aside, focusing on the immediate preparation and relief efforts from the storm.
The exception was during a press conference Wednesday in hard-hit Taylor County, when DeSantis appeared to draw attention to his Second Amendment and “law and order” bona fides. DeSantis, a lifelong Floridian, told viewers that authorities wouldn’t tolerate pillaging after the storm, and warned that residents might not either — to deadly consequences.
"This part of Florida, you got a lot of advocates and proponents of the Second Amendment," DeSantis said Wednesday. "And I've seen signs in different people's yards in the past after these disasters, and I would say probably here you loot, we shoot."
The “you loot, we shoot” slogan was popularized after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when Homestead, Fla., residents spray painted the words on their homes. The governor used similar language during Hurricane Ian. Trump also used a rendition of it in 2020 during fights between police and demonstrators over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, and it was used in the late 1960s by former Miami Mayor Walter Headley. X, the company previously known as Twitter, flagged Trump in 2020 for posting, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and he received significant backlash.
DeSantis’ comment, which won praise from conservatives and garnered significant coverage, came just days after a racist mass shooting in Jacksonville left three Black Floridians dead. DeSantis attended a vigil for the deceased on Sunday evening, and was booed by the crowd while he condemned the violence and promised to send safety resources to the area.
Carney predicted the “you loot, we shoot” comment would only help DeSantis with GOP primary voters he needed to win over, especially if there ended up being backlash from Democrats.
“If I was the DeSantis team, this is a great fight to have — them picking on me for standing up for homeowners who just lost everything,” he said.
But certain aspects of DeSantis’ management are getting scrutinized, even from within his own party. This week, DeSantis fielded multiple questions from the press about Florida’s property insurance crisis, as well as criticism from Trump, who took to Truth Social to accuse DeSantis of giving “up the store” with the insurance reforms he made. “What a shame for Florida!” Trump wrote, speaking to the populist wing of his party.
Since DeSantis’ election as governor in 2018, prices for insurance coverage climbed to an average of $6,000 a year, more than anywhere else in the U.S. In hurricane-prone Florida, insurers are dropping homeowners, going broke and leaving the state. In July, Farmers Insurance became the latest company to pull out of the state. The problem threatens to undermine DeSantis’ 2024 pitch that his policies help people and businesses thrive economically.
The insurance crisis in Florida is a “huge policy conundrum” for DeSantis, Carney acknowledged. And “if the upshot of this event is talking about insurance,” and not the state’s quick rescue and power restoration responses, he said, that’s a problem for DeSantis.
But a wonky, yearslong, Florida-specific policy fight is unlikely to prove to be an issue for DeSantis on a national scale or become a major talking point for his opponents at Iowa Lincoln Dinners, unless there’s some kind of dramatic response from Florida homeowners.
“I don’t think, politically, you can make this an issue unless the citizens of Florida are starting bonfires and burning the insurance companies in effigies and things like that,” Carney said.
DeSantis and the GOP-controlled legislature passed several reforms to the property insurance marketplace, but they were aimed at lowering prices over time and failed to immediately cut rates for homeowners. Among the provisions were laws making it more difficult for customers to sue insurers, in a bid to keep costs down for the industry, and another bill to stabilize the market that funneled $2 billion toward reinsurance, a backup system for insurers.
Asked about the issue on Fox News Wednesday night by Sean Hannity, DeSantis pointed to factors outside his control, including the devastation caused by Ian and to inflation, as well as reforms he signed into law. He noted four new insurers had entered the market recently, and revealed that another was on the way.
“Consumers need to have choices,” he said. “That is how you keep premium increases in check.”
