F ormer New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks it’s about time we got our act together on the climate fight. During a speech at the TIME Earth Awards in Manhattan on April 23, the U.N. Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies mentioned some recent climate disasters—from the Los Angeles fires to record breaking storms in the Caribbean and the Southeast—and called the widespread destruction “results of us not paying attention.”
“This is the mistakes we’ve made for many, many years, coming back to haunt us. And unless we get our act together, it’s going to get a lot worse,” he said. “We are part of the environment. Without the environment, we are nothing.”
He noted that—though the Trump Administration has rolled back many major environmental rules and policies since taking office—it doesn’t mean the fight is over. “Most of the past two decades, leadership on climate change in the U.S. hasn’t come from Washington,” he said. “It has come from the bottom up, from cities and states, activists and grassroots groups, businesses and investors and philanthropists.”…