Perry claims US doesn’t need Paris accord to cut CO₂

While maintaining that the US continues to lead the world in clean-energy technology, energy secretary Rick Perry defended the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Rather than any international agreement, “American innovation and technology is driving success,” he said at an 18 July press conference.

In his remarks, Perry emphasized the importance of coal and efforts to burn it more cleanly. Asked how US coal-fired generating plants are lessening their CO₂ emissions, Perry pointed to carbon capture and storage, which is far from being widely adopted. “Highly efficient, low-emission plants are the real goal,” he said. “I’ve got great hope that we find technologies and innovations that allow us to continue to use all of our energy resources in a very efficient way.” President Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal calls for cutting carbon capture and storage funding by 73%, to $115 million.

Perry noted that Germany, which leads the world in the share of electricity derived from renewable sources, emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than it did the year before. He said the US won’t “follow the course our allies have taken to their detriment” and asserted that German consumers pay the highest prices for electricity in Europe, as much as three times those in the US. (According to the European Commission, Denmark pays the highest rates in the European Union, although German households do spend about triple the 12.7 cents per kWh paid by the average US residential consumer.) “We can have a clean environment and a strong and prosperous nation,” Perry said. “We don’t need to sacrifice one for the other.”

In the same way that horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology changed the oil and gas equation, he said, new technology will be developed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Then Perry appeared to contradict himself: He said he was against government “picking winners and losers” in the private sector, but then added that as a governor he recognized the need for government “to be gap funders in places. I don’t have a problem with that.”

The US, Canada, and Mexico are holding discussions on a “North American energy strategy,” Perry announced, whose goals would be “to accelerate development of our energy resources, promoting energy trade and economic development, and enhancing the security, reliability, and resiliency of our interconnected energy systems.” He added that Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Sandia National Laboratories are working to enhance grid cybersecurity.