There’s hardly any climate funding left in Biden’s infrastructure bill

Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°101 | 4 August 2021

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Here are the figures from yesterday’s note on Biden’s infrastructure bill, except this time each proposal is broken down into climate vs. non-climate funding.

Summary: There’s hardly any climate funding left in the thing.

*For reference: Lockheed Martin got $75 billion in federal contracts last year, or $11 billion more than the amount Biden’s infrastructure plan makes available for climate programs annually.

Methodology

Climate spending can include programs supporting climate adaptation to worker-led economic transitions to environmental justice to industrial policy. It isn’t just emissions mitigation that qualifies as climate funding. That said, interpreting all this stuff as ‘climate funding’—which I did—probably means overestimating how much climate-related money there actually is in the bill.

A less generous definition of ‘climate funding’ might look only at emissions mitigation. From the infrastructure bill that would include money for: power infrastructure ($73 billion); railways ($66 billion); electric vehicles ($15 billion); and public transit ($39 billion). So $193 billion in total over 5 years (= $38.6 billion annually).

For the non-emissions mitigation measures I included the funds for: cleaning up wells/mines/toxic sites ($21 billion); connecting bifurcated communities ($1 billion); climate resilience related to water storage ($50 billion); and water infrastructure, like replacing lead pipes ($55 billion). You can see these budget obligations represented as a proportion of the total bill in the Times’ breakdown from earlier this week.

Thanks for your time,

Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)

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