State of denial
Florida Governor Rick Scott doesn’t want state workers to use the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.” Of course, Scott denies there is any such policy under his administration. Then he would. Didn’t he also recently deny he fired the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). Then the man Scott kicked out stood up and said: “Oh, yes you did.” Faced with that, Scott babbled something about wanting new leadership and similar drivel. Double talk, duplicity, and lack of transparency are signature Rick Scott attributes.
This time not one but several current and former state employees have spoken out to contradict the governor on the prohibition against using the term climate change. They are not all from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) either. Workers from the Department of Health (DOH) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) also have spoken out to contradict Scott.
But the top mouthpieces for these departments continue to vehemently deny the existence of any policy to muzzle employees regarding the phrases “climate change” or “global warming.” So who are you going to believe, Scott and his official spokepersons or several employees from three departments, some speaking on the record and some only under condition of anonymity?
The last point hints at how the non-policy policy of making climate change a taboo topic works. Scott and his minions can claim with a straight face there is no policy. That’s because actually there is no policy, that is in the sense that we usually understand a policy. Even the best media sleuths are not likely to find a written, official state of Florida document stating a no climate change talk policy. Does the Mafia ever produce a written contract when it puts out an assassination “contract”?
The “contract” and the non-policy policy nevertheless are real and have consequences. They work through verbal communication, broad hints, editing practices, punishments of violators, and other stealth devices. They work through the kind of intimidation that makes people speak only under conditions of anonymity or not at all. It’s in the same ballpark as what the military and intelligence services call “plausible deniability.”
The trouble is that sometimes deniability becomes implausible or impossible. That’s what happened to the United States in 1961 when the Kennedy administration tried to paint the Bay of Pigs invasion as a strictly made-by-Cuban-exiles affair.
The plausibility part began to fray when reporters in Miami realized that the Cuban insignia on the airplane that made an emergency landing here was a facade. Cuba had never had a plane bearing the serial number of this “Cuban” plane.
Everything unraveled after that. Plausible deniability was exposed for what it is: a lie or, in the Bay of Pigs case, an elaborate series of lies. What until then had been presented to the world as an all-Cuban affair was revealed as made in the USA in every way except for the cannon fodder.
The same kind of thing has been happening lately to Rick Scott. The pretense of a non-firing firing and a non-policy policy vanished into thin air after a series of state workers, from Florida’s former top cop on down, refused to go along with the deceptions. Scott’s plausible deniability came down as just plain lying.
Scott could of course claim that these individuals are just a bunch of disgruntled employees who are lying to get back at him. But there are certain inconvenient facts that go beyond compelling but still anecdotal evidence that would belie any that such explanation.
The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting searched DEP website documents for the phrase “climate change” from the last year of Charlie Christ’s term (2010) to the present. Looking at 2010 through 2014, so far Scott’s last full year in office, the number of references to climate change declined from 209 to 34. That’s an 84 percent drop.
Imagine a pill that, after rigorous clinical trials over a significant period of time was found to reduce the risk of getting cancer by 84 percent. The scientists responsible for coming up with such a miracle would be acclaimed by the world and hounded by the media. A drop of 84 percent in anything is a change that really deserves the overused word “whopping.”
I am not one of those people who say there are no coincidences. To give a banal example, if your watch stopped working days ago but you happened to look at it at for the first time at exactly the same time it had stopped running, you might think it’s still working. That’s a coincidence. It’s an unlikely event but not impossible.
I believe in coincidences. But given all the testimonial evidence by state employees, the 84 percent drop in climate change references during the Scott administration is anything but a coincidence. What it says is that, once again, Governor Scott earns the Pinocchio award.
