White House Official: Hurdles to Meeting Paris Pledge are Intentional

By Abby Harvey

Meeting the United States’ pledge under the Paris Agreement won’t be easy, but that’s the point, Richard Duke, deputy director for climate policy at the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, said Wednesday during the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (APRA-E) summit. “We have intentionally set ambitious and achievable goals. By definition, there are hurdles in any ambitious goal, and that’s why we’re taking such a comprehensive approach,” Duke said.

Duke noted that the administration is pursuing climate actions involving the land sector (agriculture, forests, etc.), non-carbon greenhouse gases, energy efficiency solutions, and efforts to ensure that low-carbon sources are in the national energy mix.

More than 190 countries adopted the Paris Agreement in December during the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Under the agreement, the U.S. committed to reducing its greenhouse gases 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The nation also has an ongoing goal to achieve economy-wide GHG reductions of 80 percent or more by 2050.

Getting nearly 200 countries to commit to the Paris Agreement was difficult in itself, but now comes the really hard part: enforcing it. Nearly all of the governments that agreed to the deal have submitted their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), stating publicly what they will do to reach the underlying goal to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius. The problem is, these pledges aren’t enough, said Jonathan Pershing, principal deputy director of the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis at the Department of Energy.

“If we do all of these things, and we continue with no additional action beyond what was proposed, we essentially go from a quite rapid increase in global [emissions] level to a flat line,” Pershing said. “We will end up stabilizing our total emissions and no longer increasing them. But the world’s got to be on a path to decrease, and that’s the next task.”

For this reason, the agreement includes a mechanism under which all countries are expected to report their progress and increase their ambition every five years.

Given the built-in hurdles of the current pledge and the increased ambition in future pledges, innovative technologies will key to any chance the U.S. has to meet its goals. “What we’ve got today is a set of technologies that might get us to 2025, but not the ones at a cost we’re prepared to incur that get us down the 50 or 80 percent reduction we need by 2050,” Pershing said.

To that end, the U.S. and 19 other countries at COP21 pledged to double their clean energy research and development budgets. At the same time, an independent group of investors committed to making significant investments in high-risk innovative technologies.

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White House Official: Hurdles to Meeting Paris Pledge are Intentional