WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s budget request would allocate billions of dollars for climate and low-carbon energy programs just as Republicans press for less environmental protection and more fossil fuel production, muddying the outlook for potential areas of agreement.
In a broad proposal for fiscal 2024 released Thursday, Biden administration officials cast climate change as a global destabilizing threat and fossil energy as an economic yoke to the public and a collective boon to strongmen, like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the administration’s $70.5 billion request for the State Department, USAID and other international programs would help blunt global hunger, driven in part by climate change.
