American Climate Envoy’s Good Cop, Bad Cop Roles

WASHINGTON — As the United States’ chief climate change negotiator, Todd Stern sometimes plays the bad cop, and seems to rather enjoy it.

He arrived in Copenhagen on Wednesday, took a quick shower, then called a news conference, where he blasted the Chinese for not doing enough to reduce climate-altering emissions, the Europeans for demanding too much of the United States and the tiniest and poorest nations for demanding “reparations” from rich countries for their part in polluting the planet.

“We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now,” Mr. Stern said sternly, “but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that.”

But there is a good cop, too. Those who work with him or who have sat across the negotiating table from him say that though he can be blunt, Mr. Stern is generally accommodating, low-key and highly artful in handling one of the most difficult diplomatic portfolios in government.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister and chief climate negotiator, said this week of Mr. Stern, “Obviously India’s stance on climate change is quite different from that of the United States, and there are many things in U.S. policy that I disagree with strongly, but that has not stood in the way of our developing a warm personal rapport.”

Mr. Ramesh recalled taking a long walk with Mr. Stern around a lake in Copenhagen last month during a preliminary meeting to the major climate conference under way there now. The two men engaged in a detailed discussion of a technical but important issue in the climate treaty talks: how to verify that developing countries are meeting their emissions-reductions promises.

The United States is insisting on a fairly intrusive monitoring regime, particularly for those projects that receive international financing. India and other developing countries reject some such measures as infringements of their sovereignty. While they did not come to agreement during their walk, Mr. Ramesh said: “We discussed our differences frankly. He understood me better, I think, and I certainly got a fuller understanding of where he was coming from.”

Mr. Stern, 58, was named special envoy for climate change in late January. He came to the post from a background more political than technical, although he has been involved in the climate change issue since 1997, when he was a member of the Clinton administration team negotiating the Kyoto Protocol.

Tall, bespectacled and lean, he is a native of Chicago and a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. He worked at a New York law firm and on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff for Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, before being recruited to help prepare Bill Clinton for the 1992 presidential debates.

He was rewarded with the largely invisible but influential role as White House staff secretary, overseeing the paper flow to the president and making sure that executive branch directives were carried out.

While at the White House, Mr. Stern met his future wife, Jennifer Klein, a young policy aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The couple now have three boys, ages 4 to 13. Ms. Klein works part time on women’s issues under Mrs. Clinton, now the secretary of state and Mr. Stern’s boss.

During the Clinton administration, Mr. Stern immersed himself in the climate change issue for the Kyoto talks, and took away from it an important lesson: Do not get ahead of the Senate in negotiating an international agreement. Although the Clinton administration accepted the terms of the Kyoto pact, including mandatory reductions in emissions in the United States, the Senate refused — by a unanimous vote — to even consider ratifying the treaty because it made no demands of developing nations.

Some countries, particularly in Europe, would like to see the current round of negotiations result in an extension or expansion of the Kyoto accord — major provisions of which expire in 2012 — this time involving the United States.

Cue the bad cop.

“We are certainly not going to become part of the Kyoto Protocol, so that’s not on the table,” Mr. Stern said at his news conference on Wednesday. “If you mean basically taking the Kyoto Protocol and putting a new title on it, we’re not going to do that either.”

A senior administration official who is part of the current climate negotiating team said that some of Mr. Stern’s feistiness came from the year of pummeling he had taken as the American spokesman for an often unpopular agenda.

“This is an issue where the United States traditionally did not have a lot of friends,” said this official, who asked not to be identified in order to speak more freely. “I remember at one early meeting, you would have thought there hadn’t been an election here. These other representatives were so used to beating up on the United States under the Bush administration that Todd and I had to remind them there was a different administration with a different approach.”

Mr. Stern said one of his biggest frustrations was the inability of his counterparts to understand the political constraints he must operate under.

“They look at what Congress has already done and say, ‘Can’t you do 10 percent more?’ The answer is no, not really,” Mr. Stern said. “They have learned more about our Congressional system and things like filibuster rules than they probably ever wanted to know.”