To Protect
Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find, by Christopher Flavelle, 3/15/17, Bloomberg
Obama’s aides spread money across
the government, eluding cuts. Most recent estimate puts tab at $77 billion from
2008-2013
What to Expect From Trump on Climate
Change - President Donald Trump will find the
job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era
policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies
-- in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
There is no single list of those
programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate
climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to
get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs
hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some
cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress
to even find.
"Much of the effort in the
Obama administration was to mainstream climate change," said Jesse Keenan,
who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and now teaches at Harvard
University. He said all federal agencies were
required to incorporate climate-change plans into their operations.
The Obama administration’s approach
will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which
is due to be released Thursday. Trump has called climate change a hoax; last
November he promised to save $100 billion over eight years by cutting all federal climate spending.
His budget will offer an early indication of the seriousness of that pledge --
and whether his administration is able to identify programs that may have
intentionally been called anything but climate-related.
The last time the Congressional
Research Service estimated total federal
spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related
activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through
2013 alone. But that figure could well be too
low. The Obama administration didn’t always include "climate" in
program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s
National Security Council.
"Given the relationship that
existed with Congress on the issue of climate change, you will not readily find
many programs that are entitled ‘climate change,’" Hill, who is now a
research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, said in an interview. At the Department
of Defense, for example, anything with the
word climate would have been "a target in the budget process," she
said.
The range of climate programs is
vast, stretching across the entire government.
The Department of Agriculture
created "climate hubs" to help farmers and ranchers cope with extreme
weather. The Department of Health and Human Services began analyzing the
effects of climate change on occupational safety. The Bureau of Reclamation
started a program called "West-Wide Climate Risk Assessments,"
measuring changes to water supply and demand. The Bureau
of Indian Affairs created the Tribal Climate
Resilience Program. The Agency for International Development created a program
to help "glacier-dependent mountain areas" deal with the risk of
those glaciers melting.
In other cases, agencies expanded
existing programs to account for global warming. In 2012, the Federal
Highway Administration made
climate-adaptation projects eligible for federal aid. Last year,
the Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $1 billion through its
Community Development Block Grant program to projects protecting against
climate change-related natural disasters.
Meanwhile, a handful of lesser-known
offices saw their funding increase while Obama was in office. The budget for
NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion. Funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which
is mandated by Congress to report every four years on the state of climate
change, rose 45 percent to $2.6 billion. At the National
Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost
doubled to $1.3 billion.
Republican Demands - Republicans noticed, and tried to
force the administration to offer a tally of climate funding. Last December,
senior House Republicans sent a letter to Obama’s budget director, demanding that his office
report how much federal money had gone toward climate programs in fiscal years
2015 and 2016.
Any cuts may face opposition in
Congress, as Democrats and some Republicans support the spending, especially
that to help communities withstand floods, hurricanes or droughts associated
with climate change. Wednesday, a group of 17 Republicans announced their
support for climate science -- and policy measures to address it.
"Budget cuts to programs -- or
elimination of entire agencies designed to help stem the costs of climate change
will only hurt ranchers, agriculture producers, and coastal communities already
experiencing the impacts of this global challenge," Christy Goldfuss,
managing director of the Council on Environmental Quality in Obama’s White
House, said by email.
‘Gravy Train’ - Some in Trump’s party now urge him
to use his authority to find those programs, and take them apart. "The
Trump Administration needs to defund the entire apparatus of the climate change
federal funding gravy train," said Marc Morano, a former Republican
staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "In order
to dismantle the climate establishment, agencies and programs throughout the
federal government need to be targeted."
"The climate funding has spread
to almost every aspect of the federal government with sometimes wacky
results," said Morano, who doubts global warming and runs the website
climatedepot.com. He cited one example of a Department of Transportation query about the link between climate change and fatal car crashes.
Others argue that the spread of
climate programs throughout the federal government simply reflects the evolving
nature of the risk. "It is irresponsible not to examine the possibilities
and understand our sensitivity to them," said Ed Link, a former director
of research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who led the
forensic analysis of Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. If federal
agencies stop doing that work, he said by email, "shame on them."
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-15/cutting-climate-spending-made-harder-by-obama-s-budget-tactics
No comments:
Post a Comment