Senate Budget Committee Mulls Climate Risk to US Coastline Communities and Regions

Republicans highlight record national debt while Democrats warn of costs of inaction

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) speaks during a congressional hearing in Washington on Feb. 25, 2021. (Susan Walsh/Pool/Getty Images)

The Senate Budget Committee on March 1 heard testimony on the costs U.S. coastal communities may be facing because of shifts in the Earth’s climate.

“Coastal communities will become harder places to live and work, and real estate values and local tax bases will decline,” predicted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who now chairs the committee, in his opening remarks.

He drew attention to a new study from the Environmental Defense Fund, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and other organizations.

It suggests real estate along the United States coasts could be overvalued by up to $237 billion because of flood risk related to climate change.

A sign at a Washington bus shelter shows the U.S. national debt on Jan. 20, 2023. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Part of the funding for that study came from the federal National Science Foundation.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) stood in for the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Johnson opened by listing some of the more florid predictions about climate change from decades past—for example, a 2004 Pentagon report warning that British winters will be “Siberian” by 2020.

“I’m concerned that the cure is worse than the disease—that we would be wasting limited resources [and] mortgaging our kids’ future,” he added.

Johnson said he believes the Senate’s budget committee needs to concentrate on the national debt, now in excess of $31 trillion, instead of climate risk.

Experts Questioned

The experts who testified included Sean Becketti of Elliott Bay Analytics.

Becketti was formerly a chief economist with the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, known affectionately in Washington as “Freddie Mac.”

Its politically driven guarantees of subprime mortgages helped trigger the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

In written testimony, Becketti described how the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) could prove vulnerable to continued sea level rise and flooding.

“Taxpayers may balk at covering the escalating costs of the NFIP in light of the predictability of the losses,” he said.

Marlo Lewis Jr., of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, cautioned that worst-case sea level rise scenarios could overstate risks to coastal communities.

“The best defense against sea-level rise is sustained investment in adaptation,” he said in his own written testimony.

Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) during a Senate Committee On Homeland Security And Governmental Affairs hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 18, 2019. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

At one point during the hearing, Lewis commented on testimony from Kate Michaud, the town manager of Warren, Rhode Island.

Michaud had highlighted the high-tide flooding already affecting roads in her community.

“I am concerned about what happens when the financial industry decides that a 30-year mortgage in my town is too great a risk to take,” she testified.

Lewis told the senators that potential rapid increases in the sea level in Rhode Island had more to do with local factors than broader climate dynamics.

“If it is in fact the case that sea levels, say in Rhode Island, are going to rise by three feet in just the next 30 years that is not due to global climate change. Only a small part of that would be,” he said.

Matthew Eby, the founder of the First Street Foundation, told Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) he couldn’t provide concrete figures on the monetary costs of relocating communities along U.S. coasts.

“I can tell you that it’s much, much more expensive to try and do these things retroactively than to actually manage these things from the beginning and use climate-adjusted forecasts to then change building code standards, or to make these decisions at the forefront,” he said.

Johnson asked experts if they knew how much money had gone toward fighting climate change so far, either nationally or globally.

None of them knew.

“Wouldn’t that be a really important number to know to compare to what the damages might be?” he asked.

Money and Science

Senators and experts alike questioned the financial incentives and backing for specific views on climate.

Jessica Weinkle, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, attested to significant interdependence between the financial sector and climate change researchers, creating conflicts of interest.

“A $40 billion industry of climate analytics enlists academic researchers as consultants,” she said in her written testimony.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) questioned Weinkle on other possible conflicts of interest in climate research—namely, between some researchers and the fossil fuel industry, which could have incentives to downplay climate change rather than play it up.

“We’ve done a very good job in pointing out these conflicts of interest in that area, but we have a tendency to turn a blind eye to it when it’s coming from other areas,” she said.

Kaine claimed investigations funded by the fossil fuel industry have “vastly dominated, outnumbered some of the other research.”

Whitehouse and Lewis sparred over the sources of money for Lewis’s institution, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with the senator inquiring into how much backing for it comes from the fossil fuel industry.

“I don’t know that,” Lewis responded, before noting that donations to the institute are anonymous.

“If Competitive Enterprise Institute wished to, it could have a policy of requiring that the actual donor be disclosed, rather than the identity laundering shop of DonorsTrust, correct?” Whitehouse asked.

“We protect the privacy of our donors, whoever they are,” Lewis said.

Lewis took issue with Whitehouse’s interpretation of a quotation from an NPR interview.

In that quotation, Lewis seemed to endorse moving entire coastal cities and regions, including New York City and South Florida, to address the impact of coastal sea level changes.

“That ‘yes’ answer that I gave on NPR was not what I think Senator Whitehouse understood me to say, which is that cities could just sprout wings and fly.

“My point was that cities are dynamic organizations, and they change, and parts of the cities grow where other parts can contract,” he said.

“They’re quite organic,” he added.

Michaud, for her part, said climate change is “a threat to the sense of community that has existed in Warren for centuries.”

“Those are about as good a conclusion as I could hope for, so I'll end the hearing there,” Whitehouse said.