Climate issue: Biden doubles funding to prepare for severe storms

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Tue, 2021-05-25 09:20 — mike kraft

As hurricane season looms, Biden doubles funding to prepare for extreme weather President Biden will announce Monday after that he’s doubling the amount of funding the U.S. government will spend helping communities prepare to withstand extreme weather events, while launching a new effort at NASA to collect climate data. While the $1 billion in preparedness funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the risks posed by climate change, and reduce their impact. Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, Matt Viser Washington Post

President Biden announced Monday that he was doubling the amount of money the U.S. government will spend helping communities get set for extreme weather events, proclaiming the need for full readiness as he visited government workers and told them to prepare for another season of natural disasters.

In announcing $1 billion in spending, Biden also emphasized his administration’s attempts to steer the country toward confronting the looming effects of climate change, which scientists say will make severe weather events more frequent and less predictable. He announced a new NASA-led effort to collect more sophisticated climate data.

“We can never be too prepared,” Biden said during an afternoon visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters. “We’re going to spare no expense, no effort, to keep Americans safe and respond to crises when they arise. And they certainly will.”

The president warned of a busy season of hurricanes in the South and East, and fires in the West. The event followed the government’s response to a brief shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which threatened to lead to significant gas shortages across large swaths of the country. And it also comes as his administration continues trying to de-emphasize the impact of the country’s divisive politics amid natural disasters.

Last year, there were more storms strong enough to warrant a name than any year on record. The worst of the storms claimed dozens of lives and did tens of billions of dollars in damage. ...

While the $1 billion in funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the damage wrought by climate change and curb it. Last week, the president signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to identify and disclose the perils a warming world poses to federal programs, assets and liabilities, while also requiring federal suppliers to reveal their own climate-related risks.

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program helps communities prepare in advance for hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. The administration will target about 40 percent of the additional money to disadvantaged areas.

Brock Long, who headed FEMA from June 2017 to March 2019, praised the decision to increase funding for a program that he helped launch under the Trump administration. But he cautioned that the administration would have to do more to bolster everything from digital systems to private supply chains in the face of more extreme weather. ...

In addition to the funding that Biden announced Monday, the administration also said it is starting to develop a NASA mission concept for an Earth System Observatory, which will deploy advanced technology in space so scientists and policymakers can better understand the interactions between Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean and ice. ...

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