I read something about rising the budget or debt limit some more trillions to plant trees?
Would not be better to put that money on carbon secuestrers?
There's a lot to unpack for the current situation, but here's an attempt:
- There are currently multiple large spending bills that have some level of prospect of congressional activity. Of these, the largest is possibly up to $3.5 trillion in total spending (roughly $1.8 trillion in net debt), and (as of current, definitely-not-final text) does include various climate positions. There may be tree-planting in there somewhere, I dunno, but there's a lot of other stuff besides including a kinda-sorta carbon standard for the electricity sector, a fee on methane emissions, money for implementing environmental reviews, etc. etc. This is the 'Build Back Better' (BBB) bill.
- There is also an impending debt ceiling/cliff. This is technically unrelated to the above, as it's about existing spending & revenue trajectories and legislation that isn't law (let alone being implemented) has no bearing on that. There are a bunch of factors going into the current debt situation, but in truth the total
amount doesn't actually matter due to how we raise the ceiling - just the fact that there's still a deficit. (This is because the normal way of increasing the debt ceiling these days is to tie it to a
date instead of a number - whatever the debt is at X date, that's the cap because congress says so.)
- There's also a bipartisan infrastructure package with some minor environmental provisions (and arguably a greater number of
bad provisions, making it possibly a net-negative bill). That one is either $1 trillion of $560 billion, depending on how you do the maths. This is the BIF.
- There's also the normal appropriations bills, with (if I remember right) a little over $1 trillion in total spending overall for discretionary spending over the next fiscal year. That includes various existing environmental programs, albeit a pretty tiny percentage. There's probably tree-planting in there somewhere. This needed to pass by today in order to prevent a government shutdown, but at the 11th hour they've figured this out.
- Both the BBB and the BIF were theoretically going to get votes this week as well, but the BBB is plagued by various Democratic infighting that spills over into the BIF because BIF was sold to progressives on the promise that BBB was also becoming law. If BIF passes first the Sinema/Manchin contingent will quite likely kill BBB, and so progressives are threatening to take down BIF.
- BIF
also includes a transportation reauthorization, but that's honestly not a huge factor at play here and has little to do with trees (unless you count turning nature into asphalt).
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4202903 times)