This seems to be confusion between "The United States Federal Government" and the entire population within the United States.
The Constitution divides responsibilities between the federal government, state governments, and the people. Education is left to the states which largely leave it up to localities.
It's kind of like saying that "The United States spends ten times as much on army helmets as it does on state parks". Well, duh, the states pay for state parks.
It also has the issue of calculating negative externalities to add to the "cost" of fossil fuels without attempting to understand the positive externalities.
The reasoning is "we will eventually have to pay for climate change and air pollution, so let's add that to the cost calculation for accuracy." This is reasonable (depending on the accuracy of your estimates) but it has to be accompanied by another calculation -- what would we have to pay for in the absence of fossil fuels that we're not paying for now? Likely quite a bit, at the very least in the loss of tax revenue caused by the economic slowdown. An estimate that looks at the cost of consequences is meaningless if you don't include all the relevant consequences of both action and inaction.
The Constitution divides responsibilities between the federal government, state governments, and the people. Education is left to the states which largely leave it up to localities.
It's kind of like saying that "The United States spends ten times as much on army helmets as it does on state parks". Well, duh, the states pay for state parks.