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Trump to shun UN climate summit in NYC for a UN event of his own

https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/trump-will-steal-un-climate-summit-thunder-with-event-of-his-own/

President Trump will direct a pointed snub at climate-change activists on the first day of the United Nations General Assembly Monday when leaders of 60 nations gather for the annual climate change summit.

Trump will be in New York, too — but will host his own hastily organized summit meeting, focusing on religious freedom, instead of joining the environmental event.

“He’ll clog up the whole system,” Ireland’s Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, told The Guardian. “He won’t go to the climate summit and he wants the distraction factor, I suppose.”

The White House announced Trump’s counter-programming plan just one week ahead of the UN’s Sept. 30 event.

Vice President Mike Pence will introduce Trump, who will speak to religious leaders and activists in a conference room in the UN complex that seats about 250 people.

The climate summit will be held in the iconic General Assembly Hall, where British prime minister Boris Johnson, French president Emmanuel Macron, and dozens of others will pledge to cut greenhouse gases to combat global warming.

Trump, a climate-change skeptic, has held to plans to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement that requires members to reduce their carbon output.

But his administration has made religious liberty a priority, endearing him to his evangelical base. In July, he met with 30 survivors of religious persecution in the Oval Office.

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