CLIMATE CHANGE/NEW YORK/UN: “The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, on Monday [3-5-18] appointed a billionaire politician from New York to be his special envoy for climate action. It amounted to a finger in the eye of another New York billionaire: the one who occupies the White House and who has dismissed the fact of climate change.
The appointment of Michael R. Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York City who is a prominent advocate in the fight against climate change, to the United Nations post comes a year ahead of a summit meeting on global warming that the secretary general is planning… In a statement, Mr. Guterres said he had asked Mr. Bloomberg to help him encourage governments and private businesses to rapidly reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases to meet the targets of the Paris climate accord…
President Trump has said the United States will pull out of the Paris climate agreement. He has rolled back a host of regulations to protect the environment, appointed climate science deniers to key posts in the administration and championed the use of fossil fuels, defying the scientific consensus that emissions from those fuels are a major cause of global warming…
Mr. Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, has teamed up with one of Mr. Trump’s most outspoken critics, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, to press cities and states to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions to help the United States meet its Paris agreement targets…
Mr. Bloomberg has given tens of millions of dollars to environmental groups fighting coal-fired power plants. In 2014, Ban Ki-moon, who was United Nations secretary general at the time, appointed him special envoy for cities and climate change…
Mr. Guterres on Monday did not mention the Trump administration, but criticism was implicit in his remarks. How society reacts, he said, will make the difference in winning what he called ‘the battle against climate change.’ “
-Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Chief Picks a Very Rich New Yorker (Not Named Trump) for Climate Job,” The New York Times online, Mar. 5, 2018