CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: Are We Making Any Progress?
June 11, 2025
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Broad Brook Community Center
3940 Guilford Center Road Guilford VT 05301
Is the world making any progress at all in combating the climate crisis, and can we count on other countries to step up as the United States once again steps away from the global climate effort?
Former U.S. climate diplomat Elliot Diringer will examine these vital questions in a talk presented by Windham World Affairs Council on Wednesday, June 11. “Climate Diplomacy: Are We Making Any Progress?” will take place at 6:30 pm at the Broad Brook Community Center, 3940 Guilford Center Rd., Guilford.
Diringer was until a year ago a senior adviser to John Kerry in his role as U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and he continues to lead international climate discussions as a Global Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. He and his wife, artist Lauren Rader, are new Guilford residents.
For more than three decades, as a journalist, a nonprofit leader, and a U.S. policymaker, Diringer has taken part in every critical moment of the global climate effort, from its launch at the historic 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to its collapse in 2009 in Copenhagen to its resurrection in 2015 in Paris.
He has played a key role over the years in building consensus among governments on ways to strengthen the global climate effort. Ahead of the Paris summit, he led a series of closed-door talks among negotiators from key countries that was instrumental in hammering out the essential elements of the Paris Agreement.
In his recent book “Landing the Paris Climate Agreement,” Todd Stern, the Special Envoy for Climate under Barack Obama, calls Diringer “consistently one of the most astute climate observers.”
Shortly before his June 11 talk, Diringer will be back in Rio convening talks among officials, experts, and business and civil society leaders from more than a dozen countries as part of the International Dialogue on Climate and Trade he is leading at Columbia.
Diringer’s focus on international climate issues began in 1992 when he covered the Rio Earth Summit as an environmental reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He left journalism in 1997 to become communications director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and joined the U.S. negotiating team at the Kyoto climate summit.
He then joined a fledgling climate think tank, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, where he and his team of experts produced seminal works on international climate policy and he regularly led influential informal discussions among lead climate negotiators. When the organization became the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Diringer was named executive vice president.
Diringer returned to government at the start of the Biden Administration as a senior policy adviser to John Kerry at the State Department. He was tapped by Kerry to lead planning for the Leaders Summit on Climate that President Biden convened shortly after taking office, which brough together 40 heads of state to reenergize the global climate effort as the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement.
Diringer’s talk will explore the enormous challenges of uniting countries to confront the climate crisis, the progress made since Paris, and how the United States’ withdrawal once again from the Paris Agreement could put that progress at risk.
