How much climate funding is there in Biden’s budget?
Speaking Security Newsletter | Note n°201 | 31 March 2023
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Formal climate spending
In Joe Biden’s FY2024 spending proposal, the Environmental Protection Agency gets $12 billion, with $5 billion earmarked for climate programs. There’s also $11.9 billion set aside for clean energy projects and R&D through the Department of Energy, and $1.6 billion more in the State Department’s budget for the Green Climate Fund. Matter of fact, there’s climate-related funding in just about every federal agency’s proposed budget, adding up to $52.2 billion total ($10.9 billion above enacted FY2023 levels).
Most of the programs seem to be about better living during the climate crisis instead of addressing its root causes. For example, the administration puts climate resilience spending at $24 billion. No doubt resilience investments are related to climate, but they seem like empty calories compared to the climate mitigation projects that actually reduce planet-heating emissions.
Informal climate spending
Considering the Republican-controlled House and the fact that climate finance isn’t among the two investments Biden considers sacred, the formal climate budget will likely end up much lower than the requested $52 billion. The punchline to all this—albeit an unfunny one—is that we’re already spending way more than that once informal climate spending is factored in. According to NOAA, there were 18 weather and climate disasters in the US that caused over $1 billion in damage last year. The total cost of these 18 disasters? $169.8 billion.
Alt text for screen readers: We’re already paying for the climate crisis. 18 U.S. weather and climate disasters exceeded $1 billion in damage in 2022. This chart has two green columns. The much bigger one on the left displays $170 billion, representing the cost of those 18 weather and climate disasters. The smaller one on the right shows $52 billion, representing the amount of climate-related funding in Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request. Data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Management and Budget.
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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