Undoing any of President Barack Obama’s climate actions will be difficult for any incoming president, Secretary of State Ernest Moniz said Sunday during a National Public Radio interview. Asked about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent statement that if elected he would “cancel” the international Paris climate change agreement, Moniz stated that while the targets in the agreement are not binding “all the steps that have been taken are based upon existing authorities and following what are typically many-year processes spelled out in law to establish rules.”
The process to rollback any of those actions, including the Clean Power Plan carbon emissions standards for coal-fired power plants, is not a particularly simple one. “If any president wants to change those, they will have to go through the same multiyear process to alter those. And so, those will go forward unless, again, a new president and a new Congress decide to redo the entire processes of rule making, and I do not believe there would be a lot of success in that attempt,” Moniz said.
Speaking in Bismarck, N.D., May 26, Trump said that he would “scrap” any regulation deemed “outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interests,” and lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas, including drilling moratoriums in Alaska and presumably the current moratorium on new coal leasing.
The billionaire real-estate mogul stated that the Paris Agreement, which was adopted by nearly 200 countries and is hailed internationally as a massive success of global diplomacy, allows “foreign bureaucrats” to “[control] what we’re using and what we’re doing on our land in our country.” The agreement does not contain any legally binding emissions reductions targets or timetables and is built around nationally determined contributions, meaning that each party of the agreement has developed its own goals.
A week before his Bismarck speech Trump said he would “renegotiate” the agreement. The feasibility of this plan was called into question immediately as the agreement may already be in force when the next administration takes office, and the text establishes a four-year waiting period for any nation to back out once the agreement is in force.
