Energy Secretary Chris Wright called an international agreement to cut planet-warming emissions “impossible” and “crazy” and said he planned to tout the benefits of natural gas on an upcoming trip to Europe.
“The Paris Agreement is silly,” Wright told a group of reporters Friday following remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations. “To agree to get to net zero 2050, it’s just a crazy, bad idea. No. 1, it’s impossible, and to try to even nudge in that direction just makes everyone poorer and makes their lives worse.”
Climate scientists — and decades of research — overwhelmingly agree that pollution created by burning fossil fuels is rapidly making the planet hotter, sparking more extreme heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather.
In 2015, almost all of the world’s nations agreed in the Paris Agreement to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius since the industrial era. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris agreement this year for the second time.
