Florida Republicans have a key climate fix: Take on China

By state Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, R-Doral

With climate in the news, Democrats have revived an old narrative that Republicans will have nothing to do with helping the environment. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I’m a Republican senator in the Florida State Legislature and the chair of the Natural Resources Committee in the Florida State Senate, and I represent a vulnerable coastal district, spanning the Florida Keys and the southernmost part of the peninsula. The environment and climate are some of my top priorities.

In my role as chair, I have helped our Republican majority advance myriad bills that allow Florida to properly steward its natural resources, clean up its coastline and address the range of environmental concerns that afflict Florida.

This session, that included an effort to create a Carbon Sequestration Task Force and funding for environmental resource management, which puts billions in recurring funds from the new Seminole Gaming Compact toward land conservation, land management, resilience and water infrastructure.

There’s one bill, though, I’m particularly proud to have shepherded: a memorial on foreign carbon pollution. This memorial passed both chambers of the Legislature with a dozen Republican co-sponsors, and ultimately with unanimous support. It calls on the United States Congress to hold China — and other foreign polluters who have much lower environmental standards — accountable for their pollution.

Foreign carbon pollution is a dangerous blind spot in the traditional environmental way of thinking. What we do to improve Florida’s resilience won’t amount to a hill of beans if countries that contribute the most to global pollution continue to emit at their current rate.

For perspective, the U.S. contributes less than 13% of world carbon pollution, and has long been on a downward trajectory of its emissions. By contrast, China makes up more than a third of global emissions, which has long been going up, up and up.

Unfortunately, to date, environmentalists on the left have taken the approach of playing nice with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just this month, the Biden administration hosted China for the beginning of another year of climate talks, and it went about as expected: China made pledges but ultimately left with a free pass to pollute.

We need measures that are more serious and effective. To help prevent the warming that jeopardizes our corals, Everglades and property insurance markets, we need to make it abundantly clear to China that they must change, and we will hold them to account.

We can start by exposing how much more cost-competitive American products would be if China met the same standards. Because of our environmental laws and laws that guarantee workers good wages and safe workplaces, U.S. manufacturing production is dramatically more carbon-efficient than Chinese production.

Initial studies indicate that Chinese manufacturers emit a whole 300-400% more carbon than their competitors in America. This difference applies to key Florida industries like fishing, agricultural and electronics. Plain and simple, we in America do it cleaner.

In light of this, it’s critical that we call out China; We cannot allow the CCP to undercut American businesses — especially small businesses — by going cheap with low environmental and labor standards. It’s absurd that American businesses have been getting beat out by foreign competitors in this way for so long, but it’s more absurd to continue now, a time when the U.S. is only getting cleaner and China’s aggression grows.

Of course, taking on China’s pollution certainly is not the only action we must take on the climate challenge, but it ought to be a priority.

That’s why Florida Republicans in the Legislature have made a call to Congress, the body that has the ultimate authority on climate and trade laws, to act. Until they do, Florida will be fighting an uphill battle trying to protect itself from intensifying impacts along our coasts. I trust that Florida’s leaders will find the way.

State Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, a Republican, is the chair of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. She represents Monroe County and part of Miami-Dade County. This opinion piece was originally published by the Miami Herald, which is a media partner of The Invading Sea. 

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