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Environmental groups in the state of Florida are working overtime this week in an attempt to stop a bill from passing the Florida Legislature that would give corporations the green light to destroy the environment. The bill, HB-991, would make it easier for corporations to obtain permits for things like mining, manufacturing, and razing an entire ecosystem for companies doing business in Florida. Audubon of Florida, 1000 Friends of Florida, the Sierra Club, the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association have joined forces this week, urging people to make phone calls to their representatives in an effort to stop the bill.

What makes that bill so dangerous is that it shifts environmental burdens from corporations to citizens. If passed by the Republican-controlled Florida legislature, the bill would no longer require a company to prove that their activities would not harm the environment or nearby residents. Instead, residents who say that companies are polluting or otherwise destroying the environment will have to prove to the state that these things are happening.

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As we approach the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the subsequent oil disaster that followed, residents on the Gulf Coast are still finding their beaches covered in oil.

Residents of Perdido Key, Florida were recently treated to a few thousand pounds of “tar mats” washing ashore, which prompted BP to quickly send out clean up crews during a busy spring break season for local resorts. Residents and beachgoers did their best to overlook the dark spots on their vacations, and were laying out and playing in the water just a few feet away from the oncoming oil. The Perdido removal has so far been the only instance where BP has removed a large tar mat.

Elsewhere in Florida, four other tar mats have popped up between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach, with cleanup efforts in those areas remaining slow. County officials are growing increasingly impatient with BP, forcing County Administrator Charles Oliver to send a letter to BP requesting immediate assistance. BP had announced, and the beaches accepted, that they would be scaling back their cleanup operations in Florida in February, since the only oil coming on shore was in the form of small tar balls.

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The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) recently released their list of the top 10 most endangered environmental areas in the nation, and the results do not bode well for the South. Nine out of the top ten areas in the nation facing severe environmental disaster are located in the Southern United States (assuming you count Tennessee and Virginia as “south.”)

Many of the areas are coastal or other forms of wetlands, and leading the list is Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Still plagued with tar balls washing up from the Deepwater Horizon / BP oil disaster last year, the SELC warns that things along the Alabama coast could become much worse in the future. In addition to the current oil coming ashore, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico are littered with oil rigs, many of which are in dire condition and could cause another catastrophic blowout dwarfing the Deepwater Horizon.

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Far from being a costly policy initiative that must be postponed for better times, major reports out of Florida and California are suggesting that climate action is potentially a vital component of economic recovery.

In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change has estimated that the state can achieve $28 billion in net economic savings between now and 2025, while reducing carbon emissions 64% from business-as-usual projections.

In California, a study by David Roland-Holst from the University of California at Berkeley projected that the state could meet Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's aggressive CO2 emission reduction targets while increasing the Gross State Product (GSP) by about $76 billion, increasing real household incomes by up to $48 billion and creating as many as 403,000 new efficiency and climate action driven jobs.

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Devastating wildfires rage across California and Florida, tornadoes raze entire cities in Kansas, and floods cover vast swaths of Missouri. Now, a conservation scientist has tied extreme weather to global warming and warned that it will only worsen with continued high human population growth.