Climate & Environment

The United Nations recently told everyone on Earth to stop emitting carbon dioxide into the air by 2050. Despite this warning, Florida Power & Light (FPL), the largest energy company in the Sunshine State, is now all but definitely building a fracked-gas-burning power plant in Dania Beach. Today, Florida’s Siting Board, a panel consisting of Gov. Rick Scott and his cabinet, unanimously approved FPL’s $888 million plan.

Rick Scott has been a friend to the deadly red tide that has killed millions of fish, fouled beaches in Southwest Florida, and even endangered Miami’s multibillion-dollar tourist industry. He has cut environmental regulation and limited crackdowns on sugar companies that dump fertilizer into the groundwater, which is the root…

A new poop leak is just the latest example of how Miami has destroyed Biscayne Bay.

A late-season storm forming in the Atlantic has a 90 percent chance of evolving into something more serious, the National Hurricane Center reports. “The disturbance is forecast to move westward to west-northwestward for the next few days, passing near or north of the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and…

For months, Rick Scott has faced scorching criticism over Florida’s red tide crisis, which has brought heaps of dead fish to the state’s shorelines and shuttered its beaches because people literally can’t breathe. Thanks to his years of environmental deregulation and budget slashing, the term-limited governor has been branded “Red…

Climate change will hurt working-class and poor communities the hardest. Monsoons and absurd levels of heat are already battering huge portions of India, for example. Closer to home, much has already been written about “climate gentrification” in Miami — that is, the process by which wealthier people are buying…

Hurricane Michael ripped a hole in the roof of Amy Bauer’s tiny apartment in Springfield, a poor Panama City neighborhood. An administrative assistant in her early 50s who gets paid by the hour, she met the storm with no cash on hand, no extra food, no batteries, no flashlights…

Miami has a reputation for being the kind of city where it’s fine to fake it. But city officials’ decision to replace dozens of plots of real grass with artificial-turf-covered concrete is not going over well.

Miami already has the highest percentage of seriously mentally ill citizens compared to any other city in America. Miami is also likely to see the largest rise in so-called deadly heat days due to climate change by the year 2100.

Hurricane Michael continues strengthening this afternoon and could deliver strong winds and heavy rain to Miami by early Tuesday. By 2 p.m. Monday, the storm’s strength had reached 75 mph, and as it moves away from Cuba, it’s expected to strengthen all the way through Wednesday, when wind speeds might hit 120 mph, making Michael a strong Category 3.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is a bad person. He’s now running for U.S. Senate, and one of his central campaign strategies is to flat-out admit he stole a then-record amount of money from Medicare and Medicaid when he ran a hospital system. He literally made it harder for poor people to go to the hospital.

Dead fish are washing ashore. Maggots are wriggling in piles of washed-up garbage. Wildlife rescuers are weeping as they encounter lifeless manatees and sea turtles. And most obvious, Florida’s waterways are clogged simultaneously with toxic green algae and toxic, choking, stinging red tide.

King-tide season is coming soon. That’s when huge swaths of Miami-Dade County flood on sunny days as the moon pulls South Florida’s already-rising oceans onto the land. But this year, toxic algae has brought stinking, poisonous, fish-killing red tide to town…

After months of watching a wrenching natural catastrophe unfolding in slow motion across Florida’s Gulf Coast and hoping against hope it wouldn’t move to the Atlantic, Miami’s dreaded day has come at last: Red tide is here.

Miami was already bracing for a miserable Labor Day thanks to a tropical wave blowing out of the Caribbean. But as of 8:30 a.m., the National Hurricane Center is actually going to be worse than predicted — that wave has now formed into Tropical Storm Gordon over the upper Keys…

Were you looking forward to a fun Labor Day weekend spent sunning yourself on the beach, drinking to excess, and blacking out in a warm haze as you temporarily forget the world’s problems? Think again. Tropical weather is coming.

South Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve is aptly named for its abundance of large cypress trees. The 720,000-acre stretch of land is one of the last few large chunks of protected Everglades wetland in South Florida — but thanks to a web of nefarious, manmade problems, the site will likely look very different within the next 50 years.

If you dump more than 500 pounds of garbage around Florida, you could be charged with a felony. Florida is one of the few states with a felony litter law, and Miami-Dade Police officers are using it: In the past three years, 53 people have been arrested for dumping excessive amounts of trash wherever they feel like it.

After 12 senior citizens overheated and died last year in a sweltering Hollywood nursing home where Hurricane Irma knocked out the air conditioning, commissioners in Miami-Dade County agreed to look into installing generators in all of the county’s public housing developments. But now that officials have crunched the numbers, those improvements seem unlikely to ever happen.