Joe Biden appoints John Podesta as US’s top climate diplomat

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Joe Biden has appointed his clean energy adviser John Podesta as the US’s top climate diplomat, moving swiftly to fill the vacancy despite a looming presidential election.

The appointment comes at a critical time for US climate and international energy policy, with allies concerned about the country’s commitment to global climate goals if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.

The White House said Podesta, who is currently in charge of rolling out clean energy subsidies and other parts of the Biden administration’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act, would continue in his current role alongside the additional duties of advising the president on international climate policy.

The move puts Podesta, 75, a veteran of the Bill Clinton and the Barack Obama administrations, at the heart of US international climate policy. He replaces John Kerry, who announced his plan to step down as the president’s climate envoy earlier this month.

Among Podesta’s other roles, he will be expected to oversee the US’s climate talks with China. Although co-operation between the world’s two largest polluters is critical to lowering global greenhouse gas emissions, broader geopolitical tensions have frequently obstructed climate progress in recent years.

Shortly before stopping down from the climate envoy role earlier this month, Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua hammered out an agreement to back a tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, and to include a broader array of greenhouse gases — including methane — in their climate targets.

Podesta has been an aggressive advocate of the IRA, the landmark climate law passed by Congress in 2022, as a tool to reindustrialise parts of the US’s rust-belt that suffered during globalisation in recent decades. The act has drawn criticism from US allies which say it amounts to…