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Given Florida’s special vulnerability to rising seas and other consequences of human-driven global warming (which I first wrote about in 1988), it’s not surprising that one of the first efforts to break the partisan impasse in the House around this issue has come from two lawmakers from the south end of that state — Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo and Representative Ted Deutch, a Democrat.

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They’ve created a “Climate Solutions Caucus” in the House to “explore policy options that address the impacts, causes, and challenges of our changing climate,” according to House filings quoted last week by Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

Here’s the mission: “The Caucus will serve as an organization to educate members on economically-viable options to reduce climate risk and protect our nation’s economy, security, infrastructure, agriculture, water supply and public safety.”

This is a promising baby step toward sanity in a body that has been so utterly paralyzed on this issue for far too long.

It builds on other signs that common ground can be found on boosting community resilience to coastal and climatic hazards and even on renewable energy, as was illustrated in passage of a big spending bill in December extending tax credits for solar and wind energy (even as it ended the 40-year-old ban on oil exports, a move with minor environmental consequences, as Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations explained).

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby post on the bipartisan climate caucus included this constructive statement from Curbelo:

“I am proud to serve as a Co-Chair of the Climate Solutions Caucus, the first bipartisan caucus to address climate change in the U.S. House of Representatives…. By exploring policy options that address the impacts of a changing climate we can effectively mitigate the inevitable effects it will have on our environment, as well as our economy.

On Feb. 5, Samantha Page playfully kicked off her Climate Progress post on the development this way:

A bipartisan caucus in the U.S House of Representatives — on climate change? Yes, this is really happening.

There’s quite a contrast between Curbelo’s position and the shape-shifting views of presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio, who in 2014 said, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” and continues, at best, to offer oblique, meaningless replies when the issue comes up.

This excerpt from a Daily Kos piece nicely summarizes a lot of what I found sifting his statements:

Rubio has flip-flopped dramatically on climate change over the years. In 2008, he supported the creation of rules that would restrict carbon emissions—i.e., cap and trade. By last April he was questioning the basic science of climate change itself, offering this mealy-mouthed attempt to placate the anti-science right wing without going whole hog into the denial camp: “Humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe.” Last January Rubio (and Cruz) voted “No” on a Senate amendment that acknowledged the “significant” effect human activity has had on climate change.

In a recent Newsweek feature, Nina Burleigh nicely captured the disconnect between local Republican officials dealing on the ground with rising-sea realities and Rubio, who is clearly beholden to deeply partisan messages, at least until the primary season ends.

Here’s the local scene:

South Florida business leaders and even many local Republican politicians are no longer in climate change denial. Now, deep in the fine print of resolutions and memoranda being passed around among the various task forces in the area, one sees the mantra “Elevate. Isolate. Relocate.”

Read this point from Curbelo, gently dinging Rubio:

Like Rubio, Curbelo is a young, second-generation Cuban-American. He says there’s a middle way between alarm and ignoring the problem. “Presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who are very familiar with these challenges, should, on the national stage, be sincere with the American public—in this case, Republican primary voters—and tell them that we are already seeing major challenges and threats to our ability to live in South Florida.”

Much of what she reports, and Curbelo’s position reflects, builds on what Yale’s Dan Kahan, who studies the human tendency to practice “cultural cognition,” found in 2014 in the Sunshine State: “What SE Florida can teach us about the *political* science of climate change.”

Hopefully, as Rubio tries to find the center in later primaries after months of courting his party’s edge, he’ll listen to folks like Curbelo and pay attention to findings like those I wrote on last year in this post: “No Red and Blue Divide When it Comes to Renewable Energy Innovation and CO2 Rules.”

For more, click back to “As Presidential Debaters Dodge Climate, 10 House Republicans Resolve to Pursue ‘Environmental Stewardship’,” a post last fall on a resolution on “environmental stewardship” introduced by Representative Chris Gibson, a moderate Republican from my neck of the woods, the Hudson Valley.

Here’s my tweet on the Florida news (follow me @revkin):

! Post-partisan climate/energy sense emerging in House via FL delegation. https://t.co/7fprJzGaU3 @climateprogress https://t.co/cAVsAjdCKi — Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 6 Feb 16

Another great example of bipartisanship behind the polarized political headlines was passage of the Electrify Africa Act, which was signed on Monday by President Obama.

How often do you see a Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman (Representative Ed Royce of California, on Medium.com) and Obama’s United Nations ambassador, Susan Rice, cheering the same achievement? Here’s Rice’s tweet: