Campaigning for Florida while ignoring Florida

Though Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump badly want to win Florida, neither has said enough about issues that affect Florida.

Start with climate change, the effects of which showed themselves last week with King Tide flooding. The topic didn’t come up in any presidential debate. It doesn’t come up during rallies. Yet climate change matters more to Florida than almost any other state, and outside the campaign cocoons are big developments.

The International Energy Agency this week reported that more people worldwide get electricity from renewable sources than from coal. Driving this shift are lower prices for solar and wind energy. Wind farms got 30 percent cheaper between 2010 and 2015. The price of large solar panels dropped by about two-thirds.

Coal emits more greenhouse gases that cause global warming than any other power source. Florida has relatively little of it. Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest utility, is almost coal-free.

Floridians, though, can’t escape the damage from coal-fired plants here – mostly in the Midwest – and elsewhere. So it matters that Clinton promises to focus on “clean energy” and cut oil and gas subsidies while Trump promises to focus on fossil fuels, including “clean coal.”

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama touted “clean coal,” which doesn’t exist any more than it did eight years ago. Fossil fuels will remain in the energy mix; natural gas supplies about 70 percent of FPL’s electricity. The International Energy Agency, however, estimated that solar could be the world’s largest power source by 2050.

But Floridians can escape the attempt by the state’s utilities to control solar power. They can vote down Amendment 1, which would create that monopoly. As of Tuesday, utilities and their front groups had contributed $22.5 million to the deceptively named Consumers for Smart Solar campaign.

As seas are rising around Florida, drug deaths are rising within Florida. The Delray Beach Police Department just announced nine heroin-related deaths this month. Results from the medical examiner’s office will determine whether a new, more lethal heroin mix is on the streets.

As of a week ago, Delray Beach police had responded to 453 apparently overdoses and 47 deaths this year. In December, a Palm Beach County task force is scheduled to release a preliminary report for the Legislature on regulation of sober homes.

South Florida is just one place where opioid abuse is epidemic. Yet that topic also was less important during the debates than Trump’s comments about a former Miss Universe and Clinton’s emails.

Trump would “create borders” to cut the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico. The problem began, however, with abuse of legal prescription painkillers. On her website, Clinton lays out a more ambitious response focused on treatment and criminal justice reform. Wasn’t that topic more important than the town hall-question of whether Clinton or Trump would be a “devoted” president?

In August, U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, had hoped to hear from the Obama administration new guidelines that could allow local governments to regulate sober houses, which draw addicts, who draw drug dealers. Frankel is still waiting. Neither Clinton nor Trump has addressed this aspect of the opioid problem.

Here’s another issue gap. The second debate took place after Hurricane Matthew had brushed nearly the entire Florida East Coast. The final debate took place while sections of North Carolina, another swing state, were underwater from Matthew. Yet we heard nothing about flood insurance or national disaster insurance, topics of great interest to Floridians.

Under Democratic control during the Obama administration, the House passed a national catastrophic insurance program similar to the one for terrorist attacks — another potentially uninsurable peril. The Senate killed it, but the idea still makes sense and could save Floridians money on hurricane coverage. Clinton and Trump haven’t said anything of note on either topic.

We began this campaign with weeks of talk about what the candidates would do for Iowa. We end it with very little talk about what the nominees would do for Florida. So vote. And hope.