United States

Lead Tracker - Alex Stark

I work for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby group in the public interest in Washington, DC. My work as part of the Peaceful Prevention of Deadly Conflict Program allows me to follow legislation in the US Congress on many drivers of violent conflict around the world, including the effects of climate change.

I recently graduated from Wellesley College in Massachussetts, where I was an Albright Fellow in the inaugural year of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. I became more interested in the links between conflict and the environment when I wrote my senior honors thesis on transboundary river conflict and cooperation in the Middle East and Africa.

I am thrilled to be part of the Adopt a Negotiator team. Tracking the US negotiators and getting the word out about the UNFCCC conferences allows me to combine my passions for activism, sustainable development, conflict prevention and US foreign policy.

The US Delegation

The US climate negotiating efforts are usually lead by Jonathan Pershing, the Deputy Envoy on Climate Change. Pershing’s a longtime veteran of international negotiations with 30 years of experience under his belt working on climate and energy issues. Technically speaking, Todd Stern, as the State Department’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, is the head of the team, but on the ground at the talks, Pershing is steering the ship. (Stern has been all over the world meeting bilaterally with foreign governments and has been instrumental in hammering out some key energy and climate partnerships and agreements.)

Worth noting: Pershing was a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (and, thus, a Nobel Prize winner along with his colleagues and Al Gore), working specifically on Chapter 13 in Working Group III, which, translated from wonk-speak, chapter that famously stated that Annex I countries as a group need to reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40% from 1990 levels by 2020. (See page 776, Box 13.7.) He also served as Director of World Resources Institute’s Climate and Energy Program for nearly six years, and before that as head of the energy and environment division at the International Energy Agency. Clearly, Pershing is someone who understands and respects what the science demands. And I don’t for a moment envy his assignment for Copenhagen, as a State Department-appointed negotiator charged with representing a US position that is, due to domestic politics, far from that which physics and chemistry tell us is necessary, and far inadequate to most of the international community.