Ali Zaidi grew up in America’s Rust Belt, going on to serve in the Obama administration for eight years and later becoming the highest-ranking Pakistani American in President Biden’s administration as deputy White House national climate advisor.
After the Obama administration, Zaidi worked as a senior advisor at the law firm of Morrison & Foerster. He later served as deputy secretary for energy and environment and as chairman of climate policy and finance for the State of New York. He also taught at Stanford University, where he founded the Lawyers for a Sustainable Economy Initiative, which provides pro bono legal services to entrepreneurs and nonprofits focusing on sustainability. He has worked to improve energy security, to reduce carbon pollution and the country’s dependence on foreign oil, and to create green jobs.
Zaidi has said that immigrants do not take things for granted. “Within a generation you’re able to see how the rungs of the ladder of opportunity are laid out in front of you, and you can see the hands that pull you up,” he told Vanity Fair in 2017. “You see people pull you up and you say, O.K., I’ve got to do the same thing for other people.”
Zaidi’s family left Pakistan when he was five, moving from Karachi, a predominantly Muslim city of eight million, to a rural, mostly Christian town of just 7,000 people in Pennsylvania.
“It was a community that helped us get on our feet and chase after our dreams,” he said. “That’s the America that I think my parents saw as a beacon across the ocean.”
