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White House: Investors Pledge $4 billion to Fight Climate Change

The White House is expected to announce on Tuesday $4 billion in clean energy investments from the private sector to help combat climate change.
Image: Barack Obama
United States President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, at United Nations headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)Richard Drew / AP

The White House is expected to announce on Tuesday $4 billion in clean energy investments to help combat climate change — an effort that includes money culled from private sector pledges and coupled with executive actions.

Vice President Joe Biden will comment on the effort Tuesday during a Clean Energy Investment Summit at the White House. The White House says the investment commitments come from hundreds of organizations ranging from the Sierra Club Foundation to Goldman Sachs.

Among the initiatives is the creation of a non-profit group that would identify and assess companies and commercial investments that result in projects that are both profitable and aim to address climate change. The executive actions are designed to encourage the private sector to invest in more clean energy efforts.

Related: Obama Makes Climate Case in Florida's Everglades

President Obama made an Earth Day trip to the Everglades in April to roll out a set of new environmental initiatives, several of them focusing on the role national parks play in protecting the planet.

The threat posed by climate change "can no longer be denied or ignored," the administration said in an outline of the new projects, which include a $26 million allocation from the National Park Service toward restoration projects across the country.

"Protecting the one planet we've got is what we have to do for the next generation," Obama said in April.

About two-thirds of Americans think that the globe is warming, according to a national survey conducted in March by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Fifty-two percent think that global warming is caused by human actions, according to the survey.

Republicans, who control Congress, oppose much of the president's agenda on the environment and say his administration's push has resulted in government overreach that stymies businesses and hurts energy customers.