New UN climate chief rejects Trump’s plans for Paris deal

The future head of the United Nations’s climate office says “it would not be easy” to renegotiate the Paris climate deal, something presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said this week he would try to do. 

Patricia Espinosa, a former foreign minister in Mexico, was appointed head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) this week and will take over the post in July. Asked by Reuters about Trump’s hope to rework the climate deal, Espinosa said that would be difficult, and that she hopes Trump won’t push for that if elected president. 

{mosads}”It would not be easy for anybody to just say ‘I want to renegotiate this,’ ” she said.

It is “really not a scenario that, in a multilateral process, you can see as something feasible.”

More than 190 nations forged the climate deal in Paris last year, pledging, for the first time, to work toward bringing down carbon emissions together. 

Trump, in his own interview this week with Reuters, said he thinks the deal is unfair to the United States and that he would look to renegotiate the accord if he’s elected president. 

“I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else,” he said on Tuesday.

Espinosa said “it’s not impossible” the climate deal could enter into force this year, locking the United States in to its commitments under the accord. 

The deal takes effect when 55 nations accounting for 55 percent of worldwide emissions ratify the deal. The United States and China, the top emitters on the planet, plan to do that this year.