Cheers! Trump to drop ‘climate change’ from federal environmental reviews
(Reuters) – President Donald Trump is set to sign an order to greatly reduce the role climate change plays in decision making across the U.S. government, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the administration’s plan.
The order, which could be signed this week, aims to reverse former Democratic President Barack Obama’s broad approach for addressing climate change, the report said. (bloom.bg/2nkDvKo)
The directive will urge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to undo the Clean Power Plan, the Bloomberg report said.
The Clean Power Plan is Obama’s centerpiece initiative to combat climate change, requiring states to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, but it was never implemented due to legal challenges launched by several Republican states.
According to the report, the measure would direct U.S. regulators to rescind Obama-era regulations limiting oil industry emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The order will also involve a reconsideration of the government’s use of a metric known as the “social cost of carbon”, which weighs the potential economic damage from climate change, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
…Bloomberg News: Obama ‘stashed’ $77 billion in ‘climate money’ across agencies to elude budget cuts
Key excerpts: At the National Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost doubled to $1.3 billion.
The budget for NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion.
Feds awarded $1 billion through its Community Development Block Grant program to projects protecting against climate change-related natural disasters.
In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration made climate-adaptation projects eligible for federal aid.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Tribal Climate Resilience Program.
The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government.
The Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies have climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone. But that figure could well be too low.
Obama Administration goal was to make ‘programs hard to disentangle’
Obama ‘integrated climate programs into everything the federal government did’
Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did.
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Via:
To Cut Climate Money, First GOP Must Find Where Obama Stashed It
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Obama aides spread money across the government to elude cuts
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Most recent estimate puts tab at $77 billion from 2008-2013
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 both 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