Unpacking the Biden Administration's Climate Politics
Lena Tabori, who sits on the Executive Board of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States (AFPC - USA) is the co-founder and publisher of climatechangeresources.org, an information site dedicated to curating resources on climate change that, she notes at the top of this interview, explore the ways climate change intersects "with our lives through our economics, our health, our security, and our politics (among others) and offers intelligent ways to take action." Having spent much of her career in publishing, including as president & publisher of Collins, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, and Welcome Books, Tabori understands how to curate and deliver powerful information. Tabori and her climatechangeresources.org co-founder Mike Shatzkin both "embrace truth" and are "passionate about delivering it in a digestible way."
It is the spirit of this work that Tabori brings to this interview with Joel B. Stronberg. An attorney with considerable experience with federal and state energy as well as environmental and sustainable issues, he has spent 40 years as clean energy and climate advocate, including working as a special counsel at the United States Department of Energy. Stronberg is currently a reporter covering climate change, politics, and the law and writes about energy and politics in his blog Civil Notion. Stronberg was an advisor to Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Widener University Commonwealth Law, where he was a peer reviewer on "Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States," a project drafting model climate legislation for policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels. He is also the founder and principal of The JBS Group, a Washington, D.C. consulting firm advising and representing public and private sector clients since 1981, providing services such as policy analysis and strategic planning to small trade and non-profit organizations in the clean energy and climate fields.
The conversation is just the first in what will become a regular series about the intersections between climate change and our lives. This one concerns climate politics and policies under the administration of President Joe Biden, who has pledged to take serious action on climate change and has acknowledged it as an existential threat but whose efforts have been stymied by a bitterly divided Congress. But the matter is, of course, more complicated than it might appear on the surface. Stronberg helps us understand "how political action, political impasse, and political will play a critical role in moving us forward."
