President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget, to be released next month, will include a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund meant to “help communities across the country become more resilient to the effects of climate change,” according to a White House press release.
The fund will be used to research both the impacts of climate change and how to prepare infrastructure and communities for climate change and will “fund breakthrough technologies and resilient infrastructure.”
In the same release, the White House said that it will spend $100 million in livestock disaster assistance for California farmers, $15 million on conservation projects, $5 million on watershed protection, and $60 million to support food banks in California “to help families that may be economically impacted by the drought.”
Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman, told Politico that Obama “is going to continue to make the case that climate change is already hurting Americans around the country and that it will only get worse for our children and grandchildren if we leave it for future generations to deal with.”
It is doubtful that Republicans will support Obama’s proposed $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund, and the fund needs congressional approval before becoming law.
The announcement of Obama’s latest climate change initiative comes only a week and a half after the White House said it would create seven regional “climate hubs” across the U.S. to help America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners “face a new and more complex threat in the form of changing and shifting climate, which impacts both our nation’s forests and our farmers’ bottom lines,” as Secretary of Agriculture Tim Vilsack said when announcing the climate hubs.
President Obama did not need Congressional approval before creating climate hubs.
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.