CIA Climate Change Center Survives Funding Opposition

The Central Intelligence Agency’s plan to open the Center on Climate Change and National Security faced a setback — aka Sen. John Barrasso –earlier this week, over opposition to what the Republican Wyoming senator called “misguided defense funding priorities.”

BNET Energy wrote about the CIA’s new center on climate change last month, prior to Barrasso’ opposition. Here’s an update on Barrasso’ objection and the center’s ultimate survival. UPDATE: A CIA spokeswoman confirmed Friday morning the center is open.

Barrasso proposed an amendment to the FY 2010 Defense Appropriations bill to prevent the CIA from using any funds to create or operate a center on climate change. His reasons were simple: with an agency that already claims to have scarce resources, why add another distraction to the list?

Or put in a more colorful way by Barrasso, “Will someone sitting in a dark room watching satellite video of northern Afghanistan now be sitting in a dark room watching polar ice caps?”

The outcome? In short: the amendment was rejected Tuesday and the defense spending bill — for a whopping $636 billion — was approved. The bill will go to a conference committee, where lawmakers will work to resolve differences with a similar spending bill passed by the House, before it can be signed into law by President Obama. 

This means the center survives and will go on to use its intelligence data to examine the effect environmental factors can have on the political, economic and social stability in other countries and the potential security risk to the U.S.

But Barrasso’ funding objection points to what promises to become a larger issue. As the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ramps up, funding needs will likely seep into a number of government agencies from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior and the CIA.

As funds are appropriated, the question of duplicity and whether a particular department has any business dipping its toes into climate change will be hotly debated.