John Kerry to become Biden’s climate czar

PBC news: Former secretary of state, John Kerry, to be his climate czar as President-elect Joe Biden plans to name several top national security picks Tuesday, his transition office said.

At an event in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden will announce plans to nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, his transition office said, and Avril Haines to be his director of national intelligence. He intends to name Kerry as a special presidential envoy on climate. The transition office also confirmed reports Sunday night that Biden will nominate Antony J. Blinken to be secretary of state and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser.

Biden will also nominate Linda Thomas-Greenfield to be ambassador to the United Nations and restore the job to Cabinet-level status, giving Thomas-Greenfield, an African American woman, a seat on his National Security Council. Kerry will also be given a seat on the council, although his job is not a Cabinet position and does not require Senate confirmation.

The emerging team reunites a group of former senior officials from the Obama administration, most of whom worked closely together at the State Department and the White House and in several cases have close ties to Biden dating back years. They are well known to foreign diplomats around the world and share a belief in the core principles of the Democratic foreign policy establishment — international cooperation, strong US alliances and leadership but a wariness of foreign interventions after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The racial and gender mix also reflects Biden’s stated commitment to diversity, which has lagged behind notoriously in the worlds of foreign policy and national security, where white men are disproportionately represented.

The slate of picks also showed Biden’s determination to push forward with setting up his administration despite President Donald Trump’s continuing refusal to concede or assist him, even as a small but growing number of Republicans lawmakers and supporters of the president are calling for a formal transition to begin.

If confirmed, Mayorkas, who served as deputy Homeland Security secretary from 2013 to 2016, would be the first Latino to run the department charged with implementing and managing the nation’s immigration policies.

A Cuban-born immigrant whose family fled the Castro revolution, he is a former US attorney in California and began President Barack Obama’s first term as director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. He will have to restore trust in the department after many key Democratic constituencies came to see it as the vessel for some of Trump’s most contentious policies, such as separating migrant children from their families and building a wall along the southern border.