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Gary S. Guzy

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Gary Guzy brings thirty five years of experience in environmental law, regulation, and public policy. He provides counsel to industry leaders in the transportation, energy, technology, and consumer sectors on emerging environmental and clean energy issues. He is skilled at creating strategic partnerships that bring together diverse groups to resolve challenging public policy controversies through close work with industry and environmental community leaders. Mr. Guzy co-chairs the firm’s Energy Industry Group.

Mr. Guzy served as Deputy Director and General Counsel of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). In this position, he helped develop and guide the Obama Administration’s environmental, public health, and clean energy agenda, bringing business insights to government policy and coordinating policy across government agencies. He spearheaded negotiations that achieved the Obama Administration’s agreement to double motor vehicle fuel efficiency standards and significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions with the support of automobile manufacturers, states, labor unions, environmental and consumer groups, and Congress. Mr. Guzy also led CEQ’s efforts to modernize permitting and environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, and counseled federal agencies on how to fulfill their NEPA obligations for dozens of high profile decisions and assisted in resolving NEPA controversies at numerous complicated sites.

Mr. Guzy served as General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Counselor to the EPA Administrator during the Clinton Administration. He was a member of the Administrator’s senior policy team, setting regulatory, legislative, and communications strategy. He led efforts to design regulatory approaches to protect children’s environmental health, develop and defend new air quality and motor vehicle standards, defend EPA from Congressional oversight investigations, and protect iconic ecosystems such as the Everglades and Yellowstone National Park. He also authored climate change opinions that were later ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark decision finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants under federal law.

Mr. Guzy has also served as the chief legal officer, sustainability officer, and climate strategist for a variety of business organizations

Contact: Read more about Gary S. GuzyEmail

The United Nations annual climate change conference—officially known as the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”), or COP27 for short—held in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, finally concluded early Sunday morning, more than 24 hours late.

COP27 was held amidst the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine and the consequent economic turmoil, including Europe’s scramble to secure non-Russian gas. It was previewed by a UNFCCC report which concluded that on its current trajectory the world faced warming of between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and accompanied by a new report from the International Energy Agency’s 2022 World Energy Outlook which concluded that the world needed to spend at least $4 trillion annually to tackle climate change from now until 2030.

Against this challenging backdrop, COP27 was never going to be straightforward. But those difficulties were compounded by divisions between developing and developed world over the priorities that should form the focus for COP27. Those divisions manifested themselves most clearly in tensions before, during, and at the conclusion of the Conference over the issue of “loss and damage.” This acrimony overshadowed almost all other aspects of the COP, which will nonetheless be viewed as historic for being the first COP to not only place the loss and damage issue on the official agenda, but for its creation of a separate fund to compensate countries most impacted by climate change. But loss and damage aside, the broader picture that emerged from COP27 was one of lost opportunities to adopt more ambitious and accelerated climate mitigation commitments in response to the dire scientific warnings about the impact of rapid global warming on the planet. In particular, efforts calling for a phase down of all fossil fuels were ultimately unsuccessful in the Summit’s final agreement and highlighted the mismatch between the pace of global emissions reduction commitments and that which is needed to avoid the most disruptive climate impacts.…

Continue Reading COP27: A Flawed though still Consequential Climate Summit

Late on July 27, Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer announced an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): a reconciliation package that implements prescription drug pricing reform, invests in Affordable Care Act health care subsidies, imposes a corporate minimum tax and improves tax enforcement, and—most relevant for this post—provides $369…

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (“COP”) in Glasgow has drawn to a close, with seemingly mixed messages and a somewhat ambiguous conclusion, it is worth reflecting on the overall trajectory of the climate issue, societal expectations, and the accomplishments that — with time — Glasgow is likely to represent.  COP26 highlighted the fragility of the planet, as well as the fragility of the global consensus-based United Nations approach to protecting it.  It highlighted the sweep of global climate-induced challenges and the scale of transformation needed to address them.  With rising temperatures has come a rising global focus on climate and a far greater set of emerging societal expectations for meaningful responses by government and the private sector.  Despite the risk that the global agreement forged in Glasgow is seen by climate activists as all talk and no action — what they referred to as “blah, blah, blah” — I believe that a number of features will endure as important accomplishments.

Representatives from 197 nations, businesses, hundreds of civil society organizations, scientists, educators, media, and climate activists — you name it — all converged on Glasgow to shine a global spotlight on the climate crisis.  The Conference had some 40,000 registered participants.  With just a few thousand of those involved in the negotiations themselves, the rest converged around elevating climate understanding, climate solutions, and climate action. And still tens of thousands of others converged to protest and lend their voices to the climate debate. Expectations were heightened by the delay of the COP for a year due to Covid-19, as well as the return of the United States to the Paris climate process. Yet all of those expectations focused on a UN negotiating process that depends on achieving unanimity for each of its outcomes.

Despite the challenges posed by gathering under the cloud of Covid and the large numbers of attendees, the COP was in some ways better organized than ever before.  It has become less exclusively an international negotiation and much more of a communications mechanism to rally world opinion around the need for ambitious climate action. The UN proceedings kicked off with a Global Leaders Summit with 120 heads of state. It featured inspiring statements from governmental and societal leaders, such as Sir David Attenborough.  The Summit then flowed into the overall COP, which had a thematic organization for each day of the conference, by which it highlighted actions or the sweep and scale of climate impacts in a more coherent fashion than ever before — spanning from energy, finance, transport, cities and the built environment, science and innovation, nature, gender, youth, and adaptation to and loss and damage from climate change.  And the overall gathering encapsulated a heightened global focus on climate as a defining generational issue in a way that has never happened before.  

The World Rallied Around the Urgency Shown By the Evolving Climate Science 

The defining element of the Glasgow considerations was the acceptance of a far sharper sense of climate science findings around the scale and urgency of emissions reductions needed to stabilize the earth’s climate and prevent catastrophic consequences.  Every aspect of the discussions was judged by the context the new climate science shows.
Continue Reading Report from Glasgow COP26: Assessing the United Nations Climate Conference

Energy, climate, and environment are areas where the policy differences resulting from the final outcome of the election also will be particularly stark. On November 4, 2020, President Trump took the final step consummating his pledge to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. This reflects his early and consistent perspective, embodied in…

Much no doubt will be written about how 195 nations came together in Paris to make a global commitment to tackle climate change and what changes in regulation and the investment landscape might result. From my vantage point in Paris during the negotiations, a few key impressions stand out.

First, the agreement overcomes those past…

Congress has a great opportunity to amend the tax code in a way which will benefit the environment, promote American jobs, and foster diversity in our energy sources. It can achieve these results by enacting the Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act.

Since the early 1980’s, oil and gas producers have been permitted to use Master…