Marco Rubio is unqualified to be president of the United States.
Consider: the U.S. Defense Department states that climate change is a "threat multiplier." Marco claims to be concerned about "jobs": his number one priority. The threat multiplication to jobs from climate change is infinite.
Today, the UK Guardian published, "February breaks global temperatures by 'shocking amount'".
"We are in a kind of climate emergency now," Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales, told Fairfax Media. "This is really quite stunning ... it's completely unprecedented," he said.
That doesn't trouble Marco Rubio. Rubio, during his term as U.S. Senator, has refused to meet with climate change scientists despite numerous appeals. His failure to acknowledge climate change threatens every job in Florida, a state most vulnerable in the nation to sea level rise, is an indication of trouble. A threat builds up over time. Rationale people address threats before threats turn into irresolvable crises. Not in the future. Now.
Marco Rubio says, he will "mitigate" our way around climate change, but the corruption in this logic -- "trust me to figure out how to deal with substantive issues in the future" -- is exposed by his dismal history related to another policy area: the destruction of water resources in Florida.
Consider Big Sugar, Marco Rubio's principal source of money for his stalled campaign. Rubio defends the corporate welfare embedded in the Farm Bill, benefiting his campaign supporters, as a matter of "national security". That is preposterous. Climate change is a matter of national security. Not a subsidy for sugar -- that Rubio mislabels in speeches as a "food".
The billionaire Fanjuls (Flo Sun/ Florida Crystals) and descendants of the Mott fortune (US Sugar Corporation) are his political security, not national security. Excess sugar is a poison. It poisons people -- through annual trillion dollar health care costs -- poisons democracy -- through the deformation of equitable campaign finance -- and poisons the Everglades. And not just the Everglades: nearly every waterway in Florida has been crushed by the failure of regulation to protect people, property, and natural resources.
Marco Rubio claims he is against government choosing winners and losers, but Rubio's support of Big Sugar in Florida and against proactive measures to veer away from climate change impacts is making losers of us all.
There are many other reasons to deny your vote to Marco Rubio on Tuesday. No mas, Marco. We've seen enough. (For an archive on Marco Rubio, read the blog Eye On Miami, here.)