http://www.ijreview.com/2014/02/115427-obama-to-pitch-1-billion-fund-to-combat-weather/ When It Rains, It Pours: Obama Pitches $1 Billion Fund To Combat 'Weather' Obama to pitch $1B climate change 'resilience fund'Obama to pitch $1B climate change 'resilience fund'
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In a
speech to farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the President unveiled a new component that will be added to his 2015 budget. It will be called
“an additional crony payoff to green supporters” “the climate change resilience fund,” and it will go towards finding breakthrough technologies, more research, and to better prepare for Califronia’s severe droughts.
The justification for this spending was given in a conference call Thursday night by the President’s assistant on science and technology John Holdren.
>
“Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.”Not surprisingly, some immediately decried the paucity of the amount. Professor Jay Lund, Director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences said, “If you spread $1 billion over the state of California, it doesn’t go very far.”
This proposal is certainly, in part, a response to a letter written to Obama last month from a collection of environmental groups. The key point in the letter:
“We believe that continued reliance on an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy would be fundamentally at odds with your goal of cutting carbon pollution and would undermine our nation’s capacity to respond to the threat of climate disruption… With record-high atmospheric carbon concentrations and the rising threat of extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and super storms, America’s energy policies must reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not simply reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”
While changing the phrase “manmade global warming” to “climate change” certainly makes the concept more acceptable, given the extreme cold weather the country has experienced this year, it does not begin to address whether or not weather patterns have actually changed due to human activity or if symbolic actions have any impact.
