Montana has been awarded funding from the federal government to reduce planet-warming emissions. It’s part of the country’s largest climate spending legislation to date. MTPR’s Elinor Smith sat down with reporter Ellis Juhlin to break down how the state plans to use these funds.
Elinor Smith: Montana got a lot of money to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How is the state planning to spend it?
Ellis Juhlin: So most of these funds are going towards agriculture and forest management projects. The state is planning to do a lot of wildfire mitigation, tree planting and extinguishing coal seam fires. There are also several projects that are promoting regenerative agriculture and reducing emissions associated with things like feedlots and livestock production. Healthy soils store more carbon, so this is really a way to kind of remove atmospheric carbon. And about 62% of land in Montana is used for agriculture and 28% is forested. So this plan really covers a comprehensive swath of the state. Here's Mark Bostrom with the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
Mark Bostrom: “With wildfires or with causing fires, with some of these other things, the total tons of emissions that you can see reduced if you're effective are pretty big. I mean, you think about it, there's a thousand, you know, coal seam fires probably burning out east. That's basically like a thousand people burning coal. You know, just in the atmosphere.”
Ellis Juhlin: And here's Zach Coccoli with the Department of Agriculture.
Zach Coccoli: “Current soils contain around 1% of carbon, whereas historically those levels may have been as high as 8 to 12%. So that difference across 8 million acres of rangeland in Montana really adds up fast”.
Ellis Juhlin: And according to the EPA, we can expect these funds to be distributed later this fall or winter, and then the projects will start to take shape as that funding comes through.
Elinor Smith: And remind us, where is this money coming from?
Ellis Juhlin: This is part of the country's largest federal climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Biden administration in 2022. And that bill gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency almost $5 billion in a pot of money that they could award to states, cities and tribes for projects that address greenhouse gas emissions. Montana was one of 25 applications out of a pool of over 300 to receive this federal funding. And it's worth noting that several tribes in the state also applied, but they're on a little bit of a different timeline, so we'll find out probably next month if any tribes in Montana will be getting some of this funding, too.
Elinor Smith: Sounds like getting this funding was very competitive. Why was Montana selected?
Ellis Juhlin: That's a great question, Elinor, and I sat down with EPA Region Aid Administrator KC Becker to ask her that same thing. She told me that Montana's plan really rose to the top because it focused on reducing emissions on working lands. So forestry and agriculture, regenerative agriculture, wildfire management and mitigation, and addressing climate change in rural communities have all been priorities for the Biden administration's work on climate. This really fits into that intention.
Elinor Smith: What does Montana's plan to spend this money tell us about how the state and governor Greg Gianforte, are approaching climate change?
Ellis Juhlin: The governor's office acknowledges the existence of human caused climate change, but doesn't believe in creating new regulations to address it. So all of Montana's proposed projects focus on optional actions that the state could take, or things that remove existing atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Every local government that wrote a plan could decide what they wanted to do. So Montana's is a bit different from what we saw in other states. Things like funding electric vehicle subsidies or investing in renewable energy and moving away from fossil fuels.
Elinor Smith: You previously reported Montana was hoping to get funding for other projects too, like school energy upgrades. What happened to those?
Ellis Juhlin: That's right. Montana's Department of Environmental Quality had asked for another $50 million, and half of that would have gone towards improving energy efficiency in schools. The EPA decided not to fund that proposal, and Becker told me she couldn't elaborate on why, but there were a lot more applications than there were dollars in the program, so EPA really couldn't fund everything.
Elinor Smith: This is a lot of money both for Montana and the country. What does that price tag buy in terms of reducing emissions?
Ellis Juhlin: Well, if you run the numbers based on the current emissions estimates for Montana, this funding reduces emissions by 14.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That's a little bit hard to conceptualize, but it ends up with a 1.1% reduction in our overall greenhouse gas emissions as a state by 2050. Nationally, that total sum, that $4.7 billion pot of money that the EPA has, reduces the United States emissions by about 0.6% by 2050. Now, these estimates could shake out to slightly different numbers, since it can be hard to quantify how much carbon would be captured in healthy soils with regenerative ag. but it's not going to be drastically different from this current estimate.
And these projects exist within the broader legislative package of the Inflation Reduction Act, like I mentioned before. So this is a piece of the whole. And climate analysts and advocates say that the silver lining here is that this particular set of funding got 46 states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico to draft climate plans as part of their application process. So the actions that are in those plans could still be carried out, just from other funding streams, and still make some sort of action on climate change.
Elinor Smith: Well, Ellis, thanks so much for breaking this down for us. We'll watch out for your reporting once these projects get started.
Ellis Juhlin: Yeah. Looking forward to it. Thanks, Elinor.
