Todd Stern
AUTHOR

Todd Stern

Politics & Social Sciences
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I came to climate change in a roundabout manner. In late 1987, already in my thirties, I swerved away from life as an unenthusiastic lawyer, joining the Dukakis presidential campaign and opening the door to a life of working at the intersection of policy and politics. After Dukakis lost, I worked in relatively short order for John and Tony Podesta’s political consulting firm (John was my boss in the Dukakis campaign), then for Senator Patrick Leahy, then in the Clinton White House as John’s deputy Staff Secretary, and then as Staff Secretary. In 1997, Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles asked me to borrow some time to help out on the upcoming climate negotiations in Kyoto, Japan and that “borrowed time” became the job that never let me go. In summer 2008, Barack Obama recruited Podesta to run his transition, and John once again brought me in as his deputy. As I thought about where I might like to land if Obama won, the idea of leading the US climate negotiating effort at the State Department was at the top of my list. After Obama asked Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State, the stars aligned, since I knew Clinton well from my White House days and because I had the great good fortune one spring day in 1994 to cross paths with her domestic policy adviser, Jennifer Klein, and seventeen months later we were married at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Which is to say that I had married into Hillaryland. Three boys and 30 years of life later, I still work on climate change and Jen serves in the Biden White House as the head of the Gender Policy Council, doing the work for women and girls that has been her passion since her days in the Clinton White House. Since leaving the State Department, I have continued to work on climate change in a variety of ways, teaching, writing articles and op-eds, and participating in regular dialogues including EU-US, India-US and US-China, among others. I decided to write this book for several reasons. The Paris Agreement was one of the most important accords of the past hundred years, grappling with a threat that will determine whether we can preserve a livable world. While the book is not a comprehensive history, I hope that an eyewitness account by the lead strategist and negotiator for the United States will be a contribution to history. And I am convinced that the book will be relevant to what happens going forward because we cannot contain climate change – a quintessentially global problem – without understanding the international climate system and learning the lessons that have gone in to building that system. In addition, the book’s last chapter focuses entirely on the going-forward question. Finally, the book does not bog down in the negotiating weeds, focusing on the arc of the story and recounting the important elements a manner meant to be interesting to professionals, students and lay readers alike.
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