Climate Law’s $250 Million in Grants Draws Interest From States

Forty-six states, 81 metropolitan areas, and more than 90 tribes and territories opted into a federal climate grant program’s $250 million first phase, giving a chance for governments to study how to reduce emissions without relying on split legislatures.

The Environmental Protection Agency has so far distributed to 41 states and Washington, D.C., $3 million each of initial planning funds under the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program. Smaller grants are also on their way to tribes and dozens of the country’s most populous cities.

Over the next eight months, the cities, states, and tribes will create climate action plans and submit them to the EPA. The agency will decide in spring who gets some of the $4.6 billion set aside in the second phase for implementing those plans.

The program paves the way for governors and state regulators, who can struggle against the legislatures that control their funding, to make progress on climate projects without dipping into general funds.

“The sky’s the limit,” Rich Negrin, secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, said of the program. “It has so much potential.”

State and local agencies could also relieve some of their capacity issues through the program, environmental groups say. Regulators can use the first round of funds to hire the staff needed to study climate issues, and the additional people can also help assess other opportunities for federal grants.

But the grants don’t create a blank check for every recipient. More than a dozen states have laws that restrict their agencies’ abilities to regulate more stringently than the federal government. Experts will need to “thread the needle” between impactful projects and accomplishable ones, said Justin Balik, state program director of advocacy group Evergreen Action.

Still, the program “has the opportunity to be a first of its kind catalyst for accelerating state climate policy,” Balik said.

Increasing Capacity

Given how understaffed state agencies are right now, the first round of Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program dollars will make a real impact—even if states don’t score implementation funding next year, Balik said.

Pennsylvania, whose administration aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, is hiring a workforce development director to assist with its energy transition. “I’m hiring a Director of Workforce Development at DPW for the first time,” Negrin said. “We’ve never had somebody in a role like that, so that we can help create a workforce development strategy around many of those conversations.”

Nearly five thousand miles away, Hawaii’s Climate Change Mitigation & Adaptation Commission is also gearing up to bring aboard five new staff members using the $3 million it received in early July.

The Hawaii commission wants to study ways to mitigate rising sea levels, wastewater contamination in shore reefs, methane emissions, and wildfires, said Leah Laramee, the commission’s climate change coordinator. The latter issue has reached national consciousness in recent days as fires tore through Maui and the state’s other islands, killing more than 100 people.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is with drought and higher temperatures, we really actually do have quite a bit of wildfires, and our wildfires are equivalent to those that happen on the continent,” Laramee said.

City Climate Funds

Four states—Iowa, Kentucky, Florida, and South Dakota—aren’t participating in the program. But they’ll still see funds flow into their largest metropolitan areas.

“Federal spending often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing,” South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem’s office said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. “We focus on solving long-term problems with one-time investments rather than creating new government programs.”

Kentucky’s Environment and Energy Cabinet said it didn’t apply for program dollars because local governments are better situated to apply for and steward the grants.

“While not administered at the state level, the funding will still be hard at work in the Commonwealth,” John Mura, the cabinet’s communications director, said in an email.

Dozens of the nation’s largest cities were allowed to apply for their own $1 million planning grants, and for states that turned down the grants, the $3 million is offered to the three most populous areas.

In Iowa, for instance, the money will be distributed among Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Iowa City. The state ranks among the top five for agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. There are no statewide greenhouse gas reduction goals, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Jennifer Fencl, a director at the East Central Iowa Council of Governments, which is stewarding the funds for two cities, says planning efforts will involve a “greenhouse gas inventory.” Each jurisdiction will then decide which projects to tackle if it’s awarded implementation dollars down the line, she said.

Scoring Implementation Grants

The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program isn’t the best-known or largest tool created by the Inflation Reduction Act, said Zach Friedman, federal policy director at Boston-based advocacy group Ceres. But it’s a swift way for resource-constrained governments to assess all the other federal funding opportunities, he said.

The EPA is asking states to include in their applications how they plan to stack other funding sources together to supplement the climate pollution reduction dollars, Balik said.

The agency will also look at cross-agency collaborations, level of emissions reduction ambition, and environmental justice commitments when deciding who gets implementation dollars, according to Balik and Friedman.

— With assistance from Stephen Lee.