Power: Must Be ‘More Ambitious’ Than Paris Climate Goals

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” USAID Administrator Samantha Power stated that we need to make the targets under the Paris Climate Accords “more ambitious” and the U.S. needs to “accelerate” meeting its targets under the agreement.

Power said, “[W]hen the president came to COP last year — to the climate summit last year, he was able to talk about America coming back, coming back to the Paris treaty, coming back to efforts to dramatically curb emissions when there had been so much rollback of the regulations that had been put in place in the Obama years. This year, he’s coming having secured a $368 billion investment in combating climate change. And you could just — it doesn’t get old, here at a climate summit, I mean, you could hear almost a gasp, again, as people grapple with what that means. Because it matters, not only in terms of the United States lowering emissions and meeting its Paris targets that have been set, which we know, over time, we need to make also more ambitious and to accelerate. But by doing — by making that substantial investment domestically, it’s going to bring prices down everywhere. And that’s going to mean more solar, more wind, more access to renewables at a cheaper price in places that are also contributing significantly to emissions.”

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