U.N. Appoints Michael Bloomberg Climate Change Envoy

Now that Michael Bloomberg is out of a job as the mayor of New York City, the UN has offered him a new job. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed the former Big Apple mayor as his special envoy for cities and climate change, the U.N. announced on January 31.

The U.N. Secretary General said that Bloomberg will aid him in “consultations with mayors and related key stakeholders, in order to raise political will and mobilize action among cities as part of his long-term strategy to advance efforts on climate change.”

Bloomberg has been offered a two-year stint in this new position to re-energize the U.N.’s global climate change debate.

In a statement, Bloomberg touted the urgent need to enact laws to stop global warming.

“Cities account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of the world’s energy use today, and their total population is projected to double by 2050,” Bloomberg warned.

He went on to say, “So the steps they take now to combat climate change will have a major impact on the future of our planet. Cities have shown they have the capacity and the will to meet this challenge.”

Bloomberg was an enthusiastic evangelist for global warming policies during his three terms as mayor of New York. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, for instance, Bloomberg claimed that the storm caused the world’s big cities to emerge as the “frontline” in the defense against global warming. He played a leading role in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an international organization of mayors from across the world hoping to leverage the power of government to “fix” global warming.

The power in the C40 network, Bloomberg said last August, is that it “creates a forum for cities to share best practices and resources and even to collaborate with other cities and institutions” that are seeking new global warming policies.

Bloomberg’s high profile with the C40 network is one of the reasons the U.N. Secretary General felt the former mayor was the best choice to re-ignite fears over global warming.

It seems that global warming is losing support, too. For instance, the European Union has announced that it will be scaling back its ambitious long-term climate and energy policies, replacing them with less stringent requirements, mostly due to the economic downturn from which the region is suffering.

Green energy efforts are also failing worldwide. In the U.S., dozens of companies have gone bankrupt, despite President Obama’s generous gift of billions of tax dollars in subsidies spent to keep them afloat. Germany, too, has finally come to realize that its push for green energy has been a massive failure.

These flagging commitments to global warming have alarmed the U.N., something Ban Ki-moon hopes to reverse with Michael Bloomberg serving as his champion.