Moniz dismisses Trump’s call to change climate deal

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz says he doesn’t think a future president will be able to undo President Obama’s climate work. 

Moniz dismissed presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s call to renegotiate or ignore the Paris climate deal, saying at a Politico event Wednesday that “that’s a hypothetical that I don’t expect to come.”

{mosads}Moniz said he wouldn’t directly comment on Trump’s promise to Reuters on Tuesday that “at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements.” Trump said the deal was unfair, economically, to the United States economy.

But Moniz noted the climate deal has built-in reassessments over the next few decades. He said, though, that countries should use those to ramp up the greenhouse gas reduction commitments they enshrined last year in the Paris deal. 

“Clearly, we have essentially every country in the world having made [contributions] and are moving forward with that,” he said. 

“But I remind you that there is, within the agreement, a mechanism for revisiting, in the sense of five-year revisits, with the idea that countries, hopefully, as costs go down for technologies, will be having greater ambition going forward as we meet increasingly stringent targets for the years and decades ahead.”

The United States, under the Obama administration, has vowed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. 

Moniz said rolling back Obama’s other climate work will be difficult for any future president, noting the challenge of undoing formal rulemaking, continued industrial adjustment to cleaner energy and the prospect for future legislation on climate change, something Moniz said “I believe we will reach.”

“The innovation agenda is going to make this clean energy future much more attractive, both for climate reasons and for things like energy security,” he said of the U.S. following through on its climate commitments.

“I believe that mother nature is speaking to us with a louder and louder voice about the need to address these issues.”