Bill makes first major American investment in climate resilience

WASHINGTON >> The $1 trillion infrastructure bill headed to President Joe Biden’s desk includes the largest amount of money ever spent by the United States to prepare the nation to withstand the devastating impacts of climate change.

The $47 billion in the bill designated for “climate resilience” is intended to help communities prepare for the new age of extreme fires, floods, storms and droughts that scientists say are worsened by human-caused climate change.

The money is the most explicit signal yet from the federal government that the economic damages of a warming planet have already arrived. Its approval by Congress with bipartisan support reflects an implicit acknowledgment of that fact by at least some Republicans, even though many of the party’s leaders still question or deny the established science of human-caused climate change.

“It’s a big deal, and we’ll build up our resilience for the next storm, drought, wildfires and hurricanes that indicate a blinking code red for America and the world,” Biden said in a speech in late October.

But still in limbo on Capitol Hill is a second, far larger spending bill that is packed with $555 trillion intended to try to mitigate climate change by reducing the carbon dioxide pollution that is trapping heat and driving up global temperatures.

House Democratic leaders Friday came to the cusp of bringing that bill to the floor for a vote but ultimately had to scrap the plans because they did not have enough support in their own caucus to pass it. They hope to attempt a vote before Thanksgiving.

“There’s a lot of good stuff in the infrastructure bill to help us prepare for climate upheaval, but that package does very little to affect emissions and therefore won’t prevent climate upheaval,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., one of the most prominent champions of climate action in Congress.

“It’s significant that we could get a significant bipartisan measure that recognized that climate change was real and we need to protect our infrastructure against its impacts,” Whitehouse said. “But it’s not enough to just do repair work. We need to prevent the worse scenarios.”

The spending falls far short of the levels of government action that scientific reports have concluded is needed to either prevent or prepare for the worst impacts of climate change.

While the infrastructure bill would spend $47 billion to prepare the nation for worsening floods, fires and storms, in 2018, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment estimated that adapting to climate change could ultimately cost “tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.”

Still, experts and lawmakers call the level of spending for “climate resilience” in the infrastructure bill historic, particularly after four years in which former President Donald Trump denied the established science of climate change, decimated environmental regulations and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord.

“This greatly exceeds anything we were able to get under the Obama administration,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council while Barack Obama was president. “We’ve made enormous progress.”

The climate resilience spending in the infrastructure bill is remarkable for something rarely achieved in congressional debates over climate policy: bipartisan support.

A handful of Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill were heavily involved in crafting the climate resilience provisions, spurred on by a recognition that global warming is already harming their constituents.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who helped write the climate resilience provisions, will see new money flow to his state with passage of the bill. In September, Hurricane Ida left at least 82 people dead and millions without power in Louisiana in the wake of a storm that scientists say offered a clear picture of the types of devastation that climate change will continue to wreak.

Cassidy called the bill “the largest investment in infrastructure and coastal resiliency in the history of Louisiana.”

“There’s people living in Lexington Parish, for example, flooded in 2016, whose lives — everything in their life was destroyed,” he said. “The pictures of their children, the wedding dress in which they married, the home in which they lived, which had never flooded before — the fact that we are helping our fellow Americans avoid that gives me an incredible sense of satisfaction.”

Billions of dollars in federal funds will begin flowing to other communities around the country that have been or expect to be hit by the extreme weather events that scientists say are growing more frequent and more destructive by climate change.

Those climate impacts are already being felt in every corner of the United States.

There were 22 climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion each in the United States in 2020.