Rohit Aggarwala isn’t the biggest fan of Climate Week. The commissioner of New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection finds that the annual sustainability event in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly happening in New York this week can become overly performative.
Climate Week “gets to be just a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of talk about how you’re actually going to get it done,” Aggarwala said in an interview Thursday. “How you’re actually going to pay for it, how you’re actually going to get people to do the work — that’s where we are focused.”
Aggarwala plans to meet with counterparts from cities like London and Copenhagen during the gathering, which he regards as leaders in climate. It’s an opportunity to trade notes but also talk about how the city has been implementing everything from organics collection to coastal resilience to Local 97 — a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from large buildings.
Ahead of Climate Week, POLITICO talked to Aggarwala about how a federal administration hostile to renewables is impacting the city, challenges with defending the city’s coasts against rising tides and implementing local policies on emissions.
