In-depth: What Donald
Trump’s budget means for US spending on climate change
On March 16, President Trump unveiled his
first budget proposal. Entitled “America First: A budget blueprint to make
America Great Again”, the document outlines how the new administration plans to
“reprioritize Federal spending”, redirecting funding away from a suite of
government agencies in favor of increases in defense and immigration
enforcement spending.
A statement by President Trump
insists the proposed cuts are “sensible and rational”, adding:
“Every agency and department will be driven to achieve greater efficiency and to eliminate wasteful spending in carrying out their honorable service to the American people.”
It’s worth noting that the document is only a “blueprint”, laying out the president’s priorities for the 2018 fiscal year. The full federal budget will be released later this spring and must first pass through Congress for approval.
In the meantime, it’s worth looking at which research programs the new administration has in its sights and the consequences of the proposed cuts for climate science.
Four ‘Earth-viewing’ programs scrapped at NASA
The president’s proposed budget allocates $19.1bn for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), representing a 0.8% cut from current levels.
In a statement on
Thursday, NASA’s acting administrator Robert Lightfoot called this a
“positive budget overall for NASA” that was “in line with our funding in recent
years” and which is sufficient to enable NASA to “effectively execute our core
mission for the nation”.
However, keeping an overall headline
figure belies major changes to the agency’s priorities.
The budget proposes cutting NASA’s
Earth science budget by $102m to $1.8bn, with four Earth science missions scrapped
completely; DSCOVR, OCO-3, PACE and CLARREO Pathfinder.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is an active satellite, launched in
2015 as a joint project between NASA, NOAA and the US Air Force. It collects
data on Earth’s atmosphere to generate space weather alerts and forecasts. More
relevant to climate science, DSCOVR carries two Earth-observing instruments.
It’s for these that the budget proposes to terminate funding.
The Earth Polychromatic Imaging
Camera (EPIC) captures the motion of clouds and
aerosols. In the video below, you
can see EPIC’s lead scientist, Jay Herman, explaining why this is important for
studying climate change. He says:
“Around two-thirds of the Earth is covered by clouds…Changes in cloud cover affect the heat balance and how warm the Earth becomes.”
The DSCOVR satellite also houses the
National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR) instrument,
which measures the reflectivity – or albedo – of Earth. As DSCOVR’s programmer
manager, Michael Simpson, describes it:
“Also looking back at Earth is the National Institute of Standards & Technology’s Advanced Radiometer. It studies Earth’s radiation budget, how much radiation is reflected back off the Earth. That is a key component to a lot of climate studies.”
The second NASA programmer
potentially facing the scrap heap under the proposed budget is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) This is the
successor to OCO-2, an instrument
that is currently circling Earth’s poles, making very precise measurements of
atmospheric CO2.
Carbon Brief spoke to the NASA scientists in charge
of OCO-2 recently about their “eye popping” 3-D visualization of the first full
year of data. Dr Lesley Ott, a
carbon cycle scientist at Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office,
explained why the mission is important:
“The main goal of OCO-2 and most carbon cycle modelling is to better understand the processes that control carbon sources and sinks…from there we can improve climate models to better predict changes in the natural carbon cycle.”
The third NASA programmer
potentially in the firing line for funding cuts is the Plankton, Aerosol,
Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. Planned for launch in
2022-2023, the mission will provide information on aerosol and clouds, as well as monitoring ocean
biodiversity.
Finally, funding may also be pulled
for the preliminary stage of the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity
Observatory (CLARREO) programmer. Hosted on the
International Space Station, the CLARREO Pathfinder mission is intended to test
techniques used to monitor and attribute climate change. A 2013 paper by
some of the developers describing the purpose of the full-scale project says:
“With its unprecedented accuracy, [CLARREO] shortens the time to detect the magnitude of climate change at the high confidence level that decision makers need.”With the planned launch for CLARREO already pushed back from the original date of 2018-20, the paper aptly notes:
“While this is unfortunate, space missions are often delayed because of cost overruns of earlier missions or changes in NASA budget plans.”
The new budget blueprint also says
it will “eliminate” NASA’s $115m Office
of Education and reduce – but not terminate – funding for
NASA’s Earth science research grants. No further details are given on these
points, other than to say the Office for Education has “experienced significant
challenges” and is “duplicative of other parts of the agency”.
NOAA faces cuts to future satellite programmer
Overall, the proposed budget would
reduce the budget for the Department of Commerce – the bureau that houses the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – by 16%.
The new administration would,
however, “maintain development” of NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System
(JPSS). These are polar-orbiting satellites that provide continuous
observations of Earth’s oceans, clouds, ozone, snow, ice, vegetation and
atmosphere.
As an FAQ on
the JPSS website explains:
“Without NOAA’s JPSS satellites on-orbit, the lost data would lead to less accurate and timely NOAA’s National Weather Service numerical weather prediction models that are needed to support weather forecasting.”
But while the three JPSS satellites
that make up the “current generation” are seemingly safe, the proposed budget
cuts funding to the “Polar Follow On” satellite project. This
part of the programmer, approved in the appropriations bill for fiscal year of
2016, allows for two further satellites to provide polar coverage through the
2030s. The proposed budget suggests the savings will be achieved by “better
reflecting the actual risk of a gap in polar satellite coverage”.
There is no specific mention in the
proposed budget of NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) programmer,
which last week was reportedly facing a cut of 26%. Prof
Kevin Trenbeth, a senior scientist at the US National Center
for Atmospheric Research, told Carbon Brief last week that he was concerned about
what this could mean for ocean observations, since the money for the global ARGO network of
ocean-monitoring buoys comes out of that budget. He said:
“If NOAA cuts back so do others – and it all goes downhill…ARGO is still a research enterprise, not an operational one. It is vulnerable. Such a cutback would be a travesty.”
The new president’s proposed budget
also “zeroes out” over $250m in NOAA grants and programs that support “coastal
and marine management, research, and education”, deeming them lower priority
than other “core functions” that the budget maintains, such as “surveys,
charting, and fisheries management”.
EPA cuts, payments to UN programs stop
As part of an overall 28% cut to the
State Department and USAID funding, the budget blueprint says it intends to
“eliminate” the Global Climate Change Initiative, an
Obama-era programmer to integrate climate change considerations into US foreign
assistance.
The new administration also proposes
to cease payments to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, which supports
low-carbon projects in developing countries, and to reduce funding for
development banks, such as the World Bank, by approximately $650m over three
years.
The Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) is one of the biggest losers from the proposed
budget, in line for a cut of $2.6bn, or 31% from current funding levels.
As rumored, the new administration
proposes discontinuing funding for the Clean Power Plan, as well as “international climate
change programs, climate change research and partnership programs, and related
efforts”. Energy Star – an initiative to promote
energy efficiency – is one of more than 50 “lower priority and poorly
performing” programs also facing the chop.
What happens now?
The proposed budget will be
submitted to Congress as a series of “annual appropriations bills”, explains BBC News. With each needing 60 votes in the
Senate to succeed, the piece reads:
“At least eight Democrats would have to vote for the cuts or at least refuse to obstruct it. Given the level of Democratic animosity towards Mr Trump, those possibilities look slim.”
It’s a long road and much of the
impact of budgetary changes on climate research remains to be seen. But the new
blueprint is valuable in outlining the new administration’s priorities.