Ernest Moniz, the nation’s new Energy Secretary, said climate change is “not debatable” in one of his first speeches on the job.
“I’m not here to debate what’s not debatable,” Moniz said at the White House Leadership Summit on Women, Climate and Energy on May 23. “The threat from climate change is real and urgent.”
“The science fully demands a prudent response,” he said, referring to recent reports that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising to levels not seen for millions of years.
“Just this month, as you know, kind of symbolically hitting essentially 400 [parts per million] CO2 — of course, that’s not including the non-CO2 greenhouse gases, which really pump you up to about 450, in effect. So we really need to get after this,” Moniz said. “It’s an important imperative.”
Moniz said the only “legitimate debate” regarding climate change involves solutions to the problem, not its cause.
Under his leadership, Moniz said the Department of Energy will emphasize energy efficiency, which he called a “classic win-win-win situation.”
Among other things, DOE is developing new efficiency standards for appliances.
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