Washington Lawyer - September/October 2020 - 44

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Susan Biniaz

Climate Change Master Negotiator

By Richard Blaustein

"In my estimation there really isn't anybody
like Sue in any other delegation anywhere
around the world," says Todd Stern, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institute and the
Obama administration's special envoy for
climate change from 2009 to 2016. "She was
a counselor to me in all matters substantive
and strategic, and also has an amazing ability
to figure out a way to bridge a gap on
whatever the issue might be."
Raised in Wantagh, New York - the "gateway
to Jones Beach," she points out - Biniaz
attended Yale University, thinking she would
pursue a pre-med path. But she delighted in
the humanities courses she took and majored
in Russian studies. At one point her dormitory
resident adviser, a law student, suggested that
Biniaz consider work at the State Department
Office of the Legal Adviser if she chose the law
school route. Biniaz later worked there one
summer while a student at Columbia Law
School. Earning her JD in 1983, Biniaz clerked
for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then
commenced full-time work at the State
Department in 1984.

44 WASHINGTON LAWYER

Biniaz believed she would stay a few years
and then work for a law firm, but her State
Department career lasted more than three
decades. "It never stopped being fun," Biniaz
says. "If you were sitting in an office in an
academic institution, you couldn't make up
the kinds of issues we confronted. That is
how interesting, bizarre, and challenging
things were."
At the State Department legal affairs office
in the 1980s, Biniaz employed her Russian
language skills, working on bilateral treaties
with the Soviet Union such as the USA-USSR
Maritime Boundary Agreement covering the
world's longest maritime boundary - over
1,000 miles in the Bering Sea and northern
Pacific Ocean. No less exciting, in the late
'80s Biniaz chaired the international group of
lawyers that drafted the operating agreement
for Space Station Freedom, of which the United

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020

Energy Policy Institute/University of Chicago

Problem solving" is how Susan (Sue)

Biniaz describes her approach to

international law and negotiations.
In her 32-year State Department career,
Biniaz was a redoubtable figure on many
international law issues, most prominently
as a climate change negotiator for more than
a quarter century. Since retiring in January
2017, Biniaz has remained actively engaged
in international climate develop-ments as
a senior fellow for the United Nations
Foundation and through her law school
and university teaching.

States, Western Europe, Japan, and Canada participated, with Russia joining later. "We had to
create a legal regime from scratch," Biniaz
recalls. "We had to figure out what would be
the criminal law up there . . . the civil law, the
liability regime, what happens in terms of intellectual property if something is invented up
there."
The same office that managed the space
station work - the State Department's Bureau
of Oceans and International Environmental and
Scientific Affairs - handled the emerging issue
of climate change, so Biniaz easily segued in
1988 to setting up the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC's first assess-
ment report had a decisive role in creating
the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), the world's primary
climate change agreement adopted at the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

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