The fiscal 2015 Department of Defense spending bill that cleared the House last Friday would block DOD funding for major international and domestic climate change research.

The amendment by Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) -- one of more than 150 amendments offered to the appropriations bill -- would prevent the Defense Department from helping to plan or implement the National Climate Assessment and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The amendment targets two perennial GOP targets: the NCA and the U.S. contribution to the IPCC -- which seek to measure the effects of climate change in the United States and globally. And it would bar the United States from participation in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

It would also prevent the Obama administration from using its newly revised social cost of carbon, an estimate for the societal cost of heat-trapping emissions that has figured in the cost-benefit analyses for some agency rulemakings. Critics have accused the administration of inflating the cost of carbon to justify costly regulations.

The rider cleared the House last week together with the underlying bill but seems unlikely to survive the Democratic-controlled Senate. Very few environmental policy riders have cleared the Senate in recent years to become law.

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) said that it had become a normal practice in recent years to attach policy riders of this kind to appropriations measures. "I do believe in climate change," said Frelinghuysen, who chairs the Defense Appropriations subpanel. "This is the kind of thing that occurs in a lot of our bills."

The House last week also attached a measure to repeal the military's purchasing ban on carbon-intensive fuels, which has been in place since the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (E&E Daily, June 20).

Texas GOP Rep. Mike Conway successfully pushed for an amendment to prevent the Defense Department from funding a biofuels refinery unless authorized by law. However, a proposed amendment by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), which would have discouraged non-petroleum fuels, failed to obtain House approval.

Similarly, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman tried to insert a provision to ban the Pentagon from using rare earth element materials from China and various other countries. The amendment did not survive a Frelinghuysen point-of-order objection.

Numerous policy provisions, including rare earth element research, are also under consideration in the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act. The Senate has yet to take up its version.