Photo of Gary S. Guzy

Gary S. Guzy

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. Gary co-chairs the firm’s Energy Industry Group.

Gary 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. Gary 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.

Gary 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.

Gary 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

On January 14, 2025, the Biden Administration issued an Executive Order on “Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure” (the “EO”), with the goals of preserving U.S. economic competitiveness and access to powerful AI models, preventing U.S. dependence on foreign infrastructure, and promoting U.S. clean energy production to power the development and operation of AI.  Pursuant to these goals, the EO outlines criteria and timeframes for the construction and operation of “frontier AI infrastructure,” including data centers and clean energy resources, by private-sector entities on federal land.  The EO builds upon a series of actions on AI issued by the Biden Administration, including the October 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI and an October 2024 AI National Security Memorandum.

I. Federal Sites for AI Data Centers & Clean Energy Facilities

The EO contains various requirements for soliciting and leasing federal sites for AI infrastructure, including:

The EO directs the Departments of Defense (“DOD”) and Energy (“DOE”) to each identify and lease, by the end of 2027, at least three federal sites to private-sector entities for the construction and operation of “frontier AI data centers” and “clean energy facilities” to power them (“frontier AI infrastructure”).  Additionally, the EO directs the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) to identify (1) federal sites suitable for additional private-sector clean energy facilities as components of frontier AI infrastructure, and (2) at least five “Priority Geothermal Zones” suitable for geothermal power generation.  Finally, the EO directs the DOD and DOE to publish a joint list of ten high-priority federal sites that are most conducive for nuclear power capacities that can be readily available to serve AI data centers by December 31, 2035.

  • Public Solicitations.  By March 31, 2025, the DOD and DOE must launch competitive, 30-day public solicitations for private-sector proposals to lease federal land for frontier AI infrastructure construction.  In addition to identifying proposed sides for AI infrastructure construction, solicitations will require applicants to submit detailed plans regarding:
  • Timelines, financing methods, and technical construction plans for the site;
  • Proposed frontier AI training work to occur on the site once operational;
  • Use of high labor and construction standards at the site; and
  • Proposed lab-security measures, including personnel and material access requirements, associated with the operation of frontier AI infrastructure.

The DOD and DOE must select winning proposals by June 30, 2025, taking into account effects on competition in the broader AI ecosystem and other selection criteria, including an applicant’s proposed financing and funding sources; plans for high-quality AI training, resource efficiency, labor standards, and commercialization of IP developed at the site; safety and security measures and capabilities; AI workforce capabilities; and prior experience with comparable construction projects.  Continue Reading Biden Administration Releases Executive Order on AI Infrastructure

What You Need to Know. 

  • “We very much believe and respect the science,” said COP28 President Al Jaber on Monday after it had been reported that he had earlier commented that there was “no science” behind requiring the phase-out of fossil fuels to limit global warming to 1.5C. President Al Jaber went on to say that “the phase down and the phase out of fossil fuel is inevitable.”  This statement comes after heavy criticism from climate activists and scientists of President Al Jaber’s earlier comments, further emphasizing the centrality of the “phase down” vs. “phase out” debate as a wedge issue at this COP.
  • According to the UAE COP Presidency, the first four days of COP28 have seen a collective commitment of USD $57 billion in climate finance from governments, businesses, investors, and philanthropies.  Although still falling short of the global investment needs, these collective pledges show the continuing growth in climate-focused capital around the globe.
  • The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) has issued proposed guidance regarding the listing of voluntary carbon credit derivative contracts, the first guidance specifically targeting the voluntary carbon market (“VCM”) by a federal U.S. regulator.  The proposed guidance outlines certain factors a CFTC-regulated exchange, or designated contract market, should consider when addressing requirements of the Commodity Exchange Act (“CEA”) and CFTC regulations that are relevant to the contract design and listing process.  The proposed guidance will be open to public comments until February 16, 2024.

Continue Reading COP28 Day 5 Recap: Climate Finance Continues to Grow and Carbon Offsets Face More Regulation

What You Need to Know. 

  • After the opening day, action at COP28 shifted to the World Climate Action Summit (WCAS), where world leaders convened to deliver national statements and carry out initial negotiations on the Global Stocktake and expanding climate financing.  Concurrently, business leaders and philanthropists gathered at the Business and Philanthropy Climate Forum to discuss how the private sector and philanthropy can contribute to climate action.
  • UN Secretary General António Guterres opened the WCAS by urging countries to speed up their net zero timelines to 2040 for developed countries and 2050 for emerging economies and accelerate towards a “just, equitable transition” to renewable energy.  In his speech, Mr. Guterres laid out a hard line on phasing out fossil fuels, saying that “The 1.5-degree limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels.  Not reduce. Not abate.  Phase out – with a clear timeframe aligned with 1.5 degree.”
  • Fifty oil and gas companies representing more than 40 percent of global oil production joined the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, which commits signatories to align around net zero by or before 2050, zero-out methane emissions, eliminate routine flaring by 2030, and to continue working towards emission reduction.  COP28 President Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber praised the declaration as “a great first step” while also highlighting that national oil companies, which represent 60 percent of the signatories, “can and need to do more” to keep the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius target within reach.  More than 300 environmental organizations lambasted the declaration in a letter to the COP28 Presidency, stating that voluntary efforts without any accountability mechanisms are “insufficient” and that “the only safe and effective way to ‘clean up’ fossil fuel pollution is to phase out fossil fuels.”
  • The United States Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule designed to sharply reduce methane and other harmful pollutants from the oil and natural gas industry.  The final rule includes standards to reduce methane and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from new, modified, and reconstructed sources as well as guidelines for states to follow in developing their plans to limit methane from existing sources.  The timing of the announcement is indicative of the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of using COP28 as a platform to elevate pollution-reduction measures in the United States and galvanize global action.
  • 117 countries signed the Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge, agreeing to  triple the world’s installed renewable energy generation capacity to at least 11,000 GW by 2030 and collectively double the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements from around 2% to over 4% every year until 2030.  And twenty countries signed the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy with the goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050. 
  • The UAE announced the establishment of ALTÉRRA, a $30 billion climate fund in collaboration with BlackRock, Brookfield and TPG.  The fund will allocate $25 billion towards climate strategies and $5 billion specifically to incentivize investment flows into the Global South.  ALTÉRRA aims to mobilize $250 billion globally by 2030.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States would pledge $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).  The pledge by the United States was joined by pledges from Estonia ($1 million), Portugal ($4.4 million), and Switzerland ($155 million). The GCF was established by the UNFCCC at COP16 in 2010 to accelerate the development of climate mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries by mobilizing financial flows form the private sector to climate-smart investment opportunities.

Continue Reading COP28 Day 2­–­3 Recap: The World Climate Action Summit and Expanding Commitments to Climate Financing

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…

Continue Reading Overview of the Inflation Reduction Act

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…
Continue Reading Anticipated Changes on Energy / Environmental Policies

The president and his climate negotiating team seem most like the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who improbably strung a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center and mustered reserves of guts and grace— leavened by intense focus, preparation, and a mild amount of lunacy— to walk between the…
Continue Reading High Wire Balancing Act in Paris Climate Talks

Regardless of your perspective on the subject, expect significantly increasing media and public attention around climate change and greenhouse gas emissions this week.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, is convening a Climate Summit on Tuesday in conjunction with the meeting of the UN General Assembly in …
Continue Reading A Renewed Focus on Climate Change This Week in New York