Biden Pledges $3 Billion to Help the World Adapt to Climate Change


The United States promised to begin providing support at the Glasgow summit. $3 billion every yearTo help developing countries adapt to climate change by 2024. The Biden administration, assuming that Mr. Biden can persuade Congress to find the money, described it as “the largest U.S. commitment ever made to mitigate climate impacts on the most vulnerable” around the world.

But how much resilience and disaster recovery does $3 billion buy? A White House official said no one was available to talk about the hostage. Here are some final points of comparison:

  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent $50.2 billion on disasters in the last 12 months. show federal records. That’s about $3 billion every 22 days for a country with only 4 percent of the world’s population. And it wasn’t even a particularly bad year for storms.

  • After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, the United States $14.5 billion On a series of embankments and pumps to protect the city of less than 400,000 people from future storms. However, even this amount was enough to protect against a moderate storm. If another Katrina-scale hurricane hit, it could flood the city again.

  • This summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recommended spending. 29 billion dollars A project known as “Ike Dike” was so named because the idea gained support after Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston in 2008.

  • New Orleans and Galveston are a bargain compared to New York City. Army Corps of Engineers considered spending $119 billion to protect the city from flooding. In 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York needed 10 billion dollars Just to protect the east end of Lower Manhattan.

How resilient can the world hope to be if Biden fulfills his $3 billion commitment? It may be enough to preserve a smaller version of Miami. The Union of Engineers recently proposed spending $6 billion on a six-mile-long, 20-foot-high seawall to protect Miami from the Atlantic Ocean. (Natives i hate the idea, saying it will ruin the view.)

“Any money invested is moving in the right direction,” said Ed Johnson, FEMA’s former director of finance and now chairman of EHJ-Solutions, a consulting group. But this should not be seen as anything more than a small down payment.”



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