Mayor of South Miami on how climate change could force it to secede

I want to start with this idea of South Florida become its own state. Do you really expect this to happen? Are you actually going to try to secede from the northern part of the state?

I can tell you that Vice Mayor Walter Harris, who created the initiative, is taking this absolutely seriously and is now forming a committee to explore how to pursue it further.

So how likely is it?

How likely is anything? The last time the United States congress allowed a state to split was around the Civil War, and they allowed Massachusetts to split off from Maine. Are these drastic enough times that the U.S. government would allow that? Well, not with the current congress.

But they're drastic enough for you. This is about climate change for you and you see that as an existential threat, correct?

It is an existential threat. We've never had this kind of carbon in the atmosphere as a species. We've never set up the planet to do what the planet is in the process of doing. 

But in South Florida you're actually seeing evidence that other people aren't seeing at this point. Can you tell me what the scientific models tell you about how soon Miami could be underwater?

We believe that by the end of the century the street in front of my house will see high tide everyday. My house is about two miles inland from Biscayne Bay. I sit in what's called the Transverse Glade, a place where the Everglades used to cut through the Miami Ridge, and we know that the sea level is coming up. I'm going to take a Dutch film crew out to Biscayne Bay and I'm going to show them a place where I used to walk and bicycle without getting my feet wet. Every high tide it's under water. And they're going to see it.

You're seeing evidence of higher tides now and that evidence is actually changing the landscape. What about the infrastructure? How is climate change affecting or threatening your infrastructure right now?

In my city, we're starting to see inland flooding in places we never used to see it. This is because the water management district has had to raise the canal heights to keep the salt water out. As a consequence of that, they've raised the water tables up a little bit and when you get storms, the water is slower to drain. So, we start getting more inland flooding. We can address that in the short term with drainage improvements. In the long term, of course, those areas are going to have to be abandoned. We will, at some point, lose our fresh water system because the salt water will come in and displace it. We have various salt water exclusion dams on the various canals--at about one additional foot of sea level rise, those fail. The big one to fall after that is going to be the sewage system because water doesn't flow uphill very well. We expect that the sewage system is going to need to be upgraded seriously to address this problem. Most of the people are on septic and, of course, in the coastal areas, septic systems don't work at all unless you build them above ground, and that's not the case in Miami. So that will have to be reworked, as well.

This is all going on during a real estate boom in South Florida. Is new development being done in the areas that you're describing right now?

Oh yeah, South Florida capitalizes in irony. It always has. There's no more entertaining place in North America to live than Miami just for sheer amusement of people doing things that you wouldn't expect them to do. So in a coastal city, where you're expecting sea level rise to cause serious disruptions, people are absolutely throwing investment capital into coastal development. 

We're talking about people's life savings. Their most valuable asset: their home. What are you saying to home owners in your area now?

I tell people if you're planning on using that investment in order to retire, if you're planning to sell your house for the value that it's worth today, or some appreciated value, don't count on it. If you can afford to buy a house, and the payments on your house are equivalent to what you'd be paying in rent, fine, go ahead and do it. But don't count on retiring on what you're going to sell your house for in years because you might not be able to sell it for very much.

On Tuesday, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, was re-elected. What is your state governor saying to the same people you're talking to about living in South Florida?

I haven't heard him discuss the subject, but he certainly has shied away from any engagement of the topic whatsoever. I have colleagues who have tried to speak with him on the subject of sea level rise and he just listens passively and says nothing. On the other hand, a very close friend of mine spent 45 minutes alone with the governor one day and the governor said 'Yeah, I own beachside property. I see what it's doing.' So on the one hand, he has a personal awareness of it, but in his public persona, he refuses to discuss it.

Are you getting the sense that citizens are open to listening to you on this issue? Do you have to convince them that rising sea levels are tied to man-made climate change?

No, I don't have to convince citizens of this. Anybody who reads a newspaper of record in the United States is completely aware of what's going on. They may not know all the details, but they know the gist of it. For anybody who questions the details, it's pretty easy to explain what's going on. Some people still cling to this misconception that's propagated by Fox News that it's just a phase the earth is going through, that climate scientists don't know what they're talking about, that it's a natural system, all of that's wrong.

From what we can see, there's a lot of political interference to this evidence as well as some media interference as well. I would think that some citizens are buying that because it's maybe easier to believe than the truth. Do you have anyone who's resisting you? 

I occasionally get some shill from the oil companies who try to hassle me but that's about it. First of all, they trust me. Occasionally I'll get a businessman in the elevator saying 'Mayor Stoddard, is this stuff really true?' And I say 'yeah, unfortunately, it is.' For years I've tried to imagine any way that it wouldn't be, but the evidence is so solid now, there's just simply no denying it. 

If you actually have to secede, do you think you'll need an army?

If we have to secede we're going to need a lifeboat. South Florida would be a very short-lived 51st state. In 200 years, South Florida won't be here.