Energy

Congress Wants To Know If Obama Is Still Spending More On Global Warming Than Border Security

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Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
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Congress snuck a small provision in the recently passed $1.1 trillion budget deal that requires President Barack Obama to disclose how much his administration is spending on global warming programs.

The budget deal requires Obama to submit “a comprehensive report to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate describing in detail all Federal agency funding, domestic and international, for climate change programs, projects, and activities in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.”

Congress wants Obama to break down “funding by agency with each agency identifying climate change programs, projects, and activities and associated costs by line item… and including citations and linkages where practicable to each strategic plan that is driving funding within each climate change program, project, and activity listed in the report.”

The climate funding disclosure comes as Obama pledges billions of dollars to foreign countries to help them produce more green energy and research ways to mitigate the effects of global warming.

Obama pledged $3 billion to the United Nations’ Green Climate fund earlier this year, followed by another pledge to spend $10 billion on green energy research. Congress has opposed giving money to the Green Climate Fund, but there’s nothing in the budget bill that would prevent Obama from reprogramming funds that way.

“Congress, where authority to approve such an expenditure exists, has appropriated zero dollars,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. [crscore]Jim Inhofe[/crscore] said in a recent statement, referring to the Green Climate Fund.

Obama signed the budget deal into law last week, avoiding another government shutdown and extending $700 billion worth of tax credits for a wide array of interest groups.

This isn’t the first time Congress has requested Obama report the tax dollars he’s funneling towards his global warming agenda. In 2013, the White House reported to Congress it spent $22.2 billion on global warming programs that year, including scientific research, international climate assistance and subsidizing green energy technology and producers.

For a comparison, the $22.2 billion in global warming spending was nearly twice as much as the government said it would spend on customs and border enforcement that year. The Obama administration’s 2014 budget request only asked for $12 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

The White House predicted it would spend $21.4 billion on global warming in 2014.

The Congressional Research Service reported in 2013 the federal government spent $77 billion on global warming programs over the previous five years — three-quarters of that came from funding green energy production though the Department of Energy.

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