Eleni Kounalakis on Pres. Trump’s Paris Agreement Withdrawal

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I just want to ask you to comment, again, on how much help you need from the federal government, despite what the president says. It appears that the federal government owns at least half, if not more, of the forest land. And, therefore, has a responsibility. Is that not the case?

ELENI KOUNALAKIS, CALIFORNIA LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: That’s right. So, we have about 33 million acres of forests in California. We are a large forested area. For your viewers in London, that’s over 13 million hectares. And more than half of it is owned by the federal government. So, we certainly rely on the federal government to do its part in forest thinning and in managing these lands in a way that will help us to prevent major outbreaks. They have been cutting their funding for forest management. So, we have stepped in to do a lot of that work for them. The rhetoric coming out of Washington, though, goes way beyond just this kind of technical assistance. As you noted, the United States has now provided this official notification to the United Nations of withdrawing out of Paris Accord. California is staying in the Paris Accord. California’s investment both in our forward- leaning regulation to require automobiles to reduce their emissions over time, the standards that we’ve set, to the investment in our universities, to find ways to capture carbon back out of the air, carbon sequestration technology. These things are happening in California in a very aggressive way. And we’re not financial to stop with that work. And, frankly, it’s at odds with Donald Trump’s vision around climate change, which, as we know, is nothing less than denial. And so, this has created a very unhelpful level of friction. But California is not going to back down in our efforts to combat climate change. And we certainly hope that the federal government will continue to do its job because this is a vital and important part of the United States of America.