Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
2/10/2016
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday requested an additional $85.6 million for fiscal 2017 to fund its efforts to address climate change. The additional funding would bring total funding for the agency’s climate effort to $280 million. “The EPA will continue to address the impacts of climate change through careful, cost-effective rulemaking and partnership programs that focus on the largest entities and encourage businesses and consumers to limit unnecessary GHG emissions,” the agency request says.
The agency requested a total of $8.267 billion, $127 million more than the FY2016 Enacted budget of $8.139 billion.
Central in the agency’s climate effort is the Clean Power Plan, carbon emissions standards for existing coal-fired power plants, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told reporters while presenting the request. “In December 195 countries came together in Paris to approve the most ambitious climate agreement ever, and EPA’s Clean Power Plan was essential to that agreement. So we have promises to keep and in the next fiscal year we’re going to build on those promises and make progress,” she said, referencing the Paris Agreement, the first universal international climate agreement.
For the second year in a row, the EPA’s request includes additional funding to help the agency implement the Clean Power Plan, which requires states to develop action plans to meet specific carbon emission reduction goals.
To aid in implementation, the EPA is seeking an additional $25 million in the next budget. That requested funding was denied in the FY2016 budget. “State plan development, review, and approval will be complex. In FY 2017, the agency will focus resources to support states as they begin to implement or, in some cases, finalize their plans. Resources will be focused both in the regional offices to provide tailored, state-specific assistance and in headquarters where technical experts will develop guidance and other resources that are sector-wide in scope and address questions that affect overall implementation of the plan,” the request says.
The requested $25 million would be used to address a variety of potential needs by the states. “The idea is that this would be grant money,” said acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA Office of Air and Radiation Janet McCabe. “All of the states will have certain activities that they need to conduct in order to put together their plans, and so the idea is that $17.5 million of that would be … to support things like modeling, technical analysis, training and those sorts of activities. The remainder, $7.5 million, would be … grants for the states that EPA would administer.”
The Clean Power Plan funding may well be a moot issue, however, as the Supreme Court announced Tuesday evening it would stay the rule, putting implementation on hold pending judicial review, which is likely to take until 2018 or longer.
