Deputy National Climate Advisor
White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy
Ali Zaidi is the Deputy National Climate Adviser to President Joe Biden. Prior to this role he served as the Deputy Secretary for Energy and Environment and Chairman of Climate Policy and Finance for the State of New York. He lead Governor Cuomo’s efforts on all aspects of climate policy and finance, including implementation of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, infrastructure and innovation programs, and sustainable finance initiatives. Mr. Zaidi previously served as a Precourt Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and as an attorney in private practice. While in private practice, Mr. Zaidi co-founded Lawyers for a Sustainable Economy, a first-of-a-kind initiative to connect sustainability-focused startups with pro bonolegal services. For eight years, Mr. Zaidi served in key economic and environmental policy roles in the Obama-Biden Administration. In 2014, President Obama appointed him Associate Director at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he led a team responsible for overseeing a wide array of policy, budget, and management issues across a nearly $100 billion portfolio and a number of federal agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers’ civil works, the National Science Foundation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility. In this role, Mr. Zaidi also served as OMB’s chief policy official for implementation of the Climate Action Plan, which he helped design and draft, and was part of the delegation that negotiated the historic international climate change agreement in Paris. Before OMB, Mr. Zaidi served in a number of roles in the Obama-Biden Administration, including as the Deputy Director of Energy Policy for the White House Domestic Policy Council; and as Senior Director for Cabinet Affairs at the White House. Mr. Zaidi has also served on a number of boards, including as Vice Chair of the Center for Carbon Removal, Trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Director of America’s Promise Alliance and of The Generations Initiative; and as Co-Chair of the Aspen Institute EEP’s Strategy Group on Future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He holds an A.B. and J.D. from Harvard University and Georgetown University, where he was editor of the Georgetown Law Journal (GLJ) and executive editor of GLJ’s Annual Review of Criminal Procedure.
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