I’m pleased to say we have released the newest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” In this latest episode, I engage in a conversation with Sue Biniaz, long-time legal expert and lead negotiator for the U.S. Department of State in the international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Sue is currently a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. Before that, she served for over thirty years in the State Department’s Legal Adviser’s Office, where she was a Deputy Legal Adviser, as well as the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator from 1989 until early 2017. She is also a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation, and has taught at Columbia Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. She attended Yale College and Columbia Law School, and subsequently clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In this podcast episode, we talk about Sue’s extensive experience in the climate negotiations. Commenting on COP-25 in Madrid last December, after Sue had left the State Department, she takes note of the disappointment that surrounded the failure to reach agreement on the “Rulebook” (detailed guidance) for the one article (of twenty-nine) in the Paris Agreement which had not already been resolved: Article 6, which deals with modes of international cooperation, and provides the potential home for linkage of policies in different countries, including so-called carbon markets:
“It was unfortunate that they didn’t reach agreement on Article 6. I think the compromises were all pretty evident and they ran out of time. I think there wasn’t enough kind of political oomph put into it at the end. That’s an example of if the U.S. had been there at a political level, they would have been able to sort of bang some heads together and get it done.”
With COP-26 having been postponed from November 2020 to sometime in 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Biniaz believes that international climate negotiators may now wish to take advantage of this hiatus to consider ways to improve the annual climate talks.
“One of the reasons I think the COP needs to be re-thought is because I think the metric that’s been used by many people including the press has been the negotiating issues that are on the table,” Biniaz argues. “If you only look at those, it just puts too much pressure on what should be kind of a minor aspect of a COP compared to everything else that’s going on.”
With the U.S. elections looming in November, Biniaz says hopes are high that a new presidential administration will rejoin the Paris Agreement, and reengage in a productive way.
“If you’re going to rejoin the Paris Agreement, do it in a way that isn’t going to just be reversed four or eight years later. Try to make sure you have enough domestic buy-in so it’s harder for a future administration to just reverse it again,” she states. “And…if you’re going to come back into the agreement, try to use whatever leverage the United States has at that point to get other countries to do more.”
As you will quickly realize when you listen to this podcast episode, Sue Biniaz is not only very smart and exceptionally knowledgeable; she is also unusually clear and articulate. You will not regret listening!
All of this and much more is found in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Listen to this latest discussion here, where, by the way, you can also find a complete transcript of our conversation.
My conversation with Sue Biniaz is the tenth episode in the Environmental Insights series. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:
- Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
- Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
- Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
- Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
- David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
- Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
- Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
- Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
“Climate change can seem distant; it can seem invisible. Why should I worry about it? To see the whole economy mobilized when the threat becomes very, very concrete reminds me that, as we think about climate change, we have to find a way to make that threat as concrete as possible. So that’s one thing I take away from the current moment.”