A former Clinton administration climate change policy official has been appointed to a similar position within the new Obama executive team. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced Todd Stern as the U.S. chief climate change policy advisor and principal international climate negotiator. Stern worked from 1997-1999 in climate change policy for the Clinton White House and was the senior U.S. advisor staff person during the Kyoto and Buenos Aires discussions.
More recently Mr. Stern has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he also worked on climate policy issues. He has also taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and was a law firm partner.
At the announcement Mr. Stern stated: “The time for denial, delay and dispute is over. The time for the United States to take up its rightful place at the negotiating table is here.”
The appointment of a special envoy to work in the combating of greenhouse emissions and developing international accords marks a significant break from the direction of the Bush administration, which had been accused of laxity on the global warming issue.
One of Stern’s first endeavors may be getting in sync with the United Nations-backed climate change protocol that is currently being discussed between potentially 190 nations, and would replace the Kyoto Protocol. (That treaty applied to 37 mainly wealthy nations).
The new treaty would call for more aggressive cuts according to the UN Climate Change Secretariat:
“The challenge is to design a future agreement that will significantly step up action on adaptation, successfully halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10-15 years and dramatically cut back emissions by 2050.”
About Jake Richardson
President Obama and Secretary Clinton are continuing to show that they are going to make addressing global warming a top priority as they are putting their team in place in record time. Oh how refreshing a change from the last eight years of no leadership and no progress. So now we have real leadership on this issue, let's hope that we can make real progress by Copenhagen. I discuss some of the hints of that change that Clinton and Todd Stern outlined here: http://tinyurl.com/US-envoy.
This team will have to get up to speed fast, start to reach out to other countries, and begin to flesh out the US positions as the pace of the negotiations are set to pick up speed following the meeting in Poznan, Poland this past December. In just over 60 days, this team will be sitting with other countries at the negotiating table as the next international negotiations will be held the end of March in Bonn, Germany.