Good evening, everyone:

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I was pretty sure that this was an announcement of a new streaming series on the Sci-Fi channel: “A seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida.” Might yet still be – the streaming services are getting stretched pretty thin on new content.

But turns out that a sticky, viscous, gloopy, 5,000-mile-wide island of brownish-greenish  “sargassum” – an algae – is indeed moving west from Africa, taking a bead on the Mediterranean, where it promises to accumulate on beaches six feet deep.

It will make its way by summer to the Gulf of Mexico shore of Florida. A blob quite this massive takes a while to grow – it started forming in 2011. But it takes far less time to make an appearance on beaches – it can build up over the course of a single night.

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There is a dose of good news in this. The Sargassum Information Hub – one of the great organizational names I’ve heard, even if it makes foundation funding quite unlikely – notes that the blob provides both food and protection for a variety of sea creatures, including fish, mammals, and sea turtles. Before we celebrate too soon, however, the blob has grown so large that it threatens to suck oxygen out of the water and create dead zones – the Fox News effect.

I’m not going to try to catalogue the other various ways the blob can be a very bad thing. But it struck me as enough of a national threat that we should know how our likely candidates for president propose that we deal with it. My very brief conversations with some of the leading contenders yielded the following:

• Florida Governor DeSantis: “We do things the Florida way. We are the number one destination for everything. That the algae is headed here looking for a better life should be no surprise.”
• Former President Trump: “It’s no coincidence that Meatball Ron will be joined by the Sargassum Blob. I’m going to have a hard time telling them apart.”

• Former Secretary of State Pompeo: “This is what nukes were made for. We’ll blow the thing back to China, which is where this thing probably started – undoubtedly in a lab.”

• Former Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley: “We’re not going to raise taxes just to save some beaches in Florida. If it swerves toward South Carolina, we’ll think about it. Or maybe we should raise taxes, just in case. It’s probably a good reason to raise the retirement age.”

• Former Vice President Pence: “I understand that these algae can be male, female, or bisexual. That’s an unnatural thing and not something I can approve of. If the Almighty wants to drive them to the beaches where they get collected and disposed of, that’s fine with me.”

• President Biden: “This is a clarion call to redouble our attack on climate change. We’ve got a bunch of tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act to convert this blue stuff (it is blue, isn’t it?) into Ford electric vehicles. You guys in Michigan will thank me.”

• California Governor Newsome: “Send it to us. We need to rebuild our shoreline.”

• Senator Bernie Sanders (yeah, I know – probably not a candidate, but always worth talking to): “This is exactly what the working men and women of America need. It will create jobs. Algae shovelers, dump truck drivers, sand purification specialists, college students on break who need to pick stuff up. And we’ll fund all of this by a wealth tax on beachfront property owners.”

• Michigan Governor Whitmer (yes, really): “Fix the damn beaches.”

If you hear of any others, let me know.

Rip

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