David Gura

This was something born

out of the effort to secure peace in the Middle East, in Gaza in particular, but it's certainly expanded into something bigger since then.

I'm here with the chairman of C40 Cities, a group that's very active here in the early days of this COP 30 summit.

Let me start by asking about the role of mayors in this conversation.

We in the U.S.

know well that the president has expressed more than skepticism about climate change.

I hadn't noticed.

There you go.

What's the role of mayors here and how do you see this conversation evolving over the next three weeks?

It's always a parlor game of how big a deal a COP 30 is going to be.

Set the expectations for us in terms of what we'll get out of this at the end of it.

Your message to the British government, UK government, was this can't be the Ed Miliband show.

It can't just be the Energy Secretary talking about climate.

It has to be something that the Labour Party, the government, takes up in earnest.

What is your message to them in full about how they should be looking at this event and the role of climate change in their conversation, their policy conversations more broadly?

We're hearing an awful lot about London.

It's being caricatured and stereotyped in the context of this mayoral race by the president, by one of the candidates for mayor as well.

It's being portrayed as a place that's out of control, a lot of crime.

There's a heavy amount of Islamophobia in there as well.

What's your response to that, the way that London is being used as sort of something held up in the New York mayoral campaign?