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Thomas R. Kuhn

President
Edison Electric Institute (EEI)

Thomas R. Kuhn is president of the Edison Electric Institute, the association of investor-owned electric companies whose members generate and distribute approximately three-quarters of the Nation's electricity. In addition, EEI has a growing affiliate membership of utilities worldwide. Mr. Kuhn joined the Institute in 1985 as executive vice president, was named chief operating officer in 1988, and elected president in 1990.

Prior to joining the Institute, Mr. Kuhn was president of the American Nuclear Energy Council, which subsequently merged with the Nuclear Energy Institute. The Council represented virtually all of the companies in the commercial nuclear power industry. He joined the Council in 1975 as vice president, government affairs, and became president in 1983.

From 1972 to 1975, he headed the energy section of the investment banking firm, Alex Brown and Sons. Prior to that, from 1970 to 1972, Mr. Kuhn was White House Liaison Officer to the Secretary of the Navy.

Mr. Kuhn received a BA in Economics in 1968 from Yale University, served as a Naval Officer following his graduation, and completed a Masters in Business Administration in 1972 from George Washington University. He completed the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Senior Executive Program in 1989.

Mr. Kuhn served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board and the Board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He currently serves on the Boards of the United States Energy Association, The Alliance to Save Energy, The Electric Drive Transportation Association and the American Council for Capital Formation. He is chairman of the Committee of 100 of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. He is Chairman-Emeritus of the American Society of Association Executives, and past-chairman of ASAE's Key Industry Association Committee and of the Trade Association Liaison Council.

Mr. Kuhn was chosen as Association Executive of the Year 2000 by Association Trends magazine. He was the recipient of The Energy Daily's 2000 Public Policy Leadership Award. Mr. Kuhn also received the Alliance to Save Energy's 2004 Chairman's Award.

Mr. Kuhn serves on the Boards of the National Park Foundation and the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation. He also serves on the Board of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, as well as being a Board member and past chairman of the National Capital Chapter. Mr. Kuhn was awarded the Bess Goodman Humanitarian Award in 2000. He served as 1992 and 1997 chairman of the Associations Division, United Way Campaign, and chairman of the 1996 through 1998 National Alliance to End Homelessness Awards dinners.

 

Eugene Linden
Investigative Journalist, Author

Eugene Linden writes about science, technology, the environment and humanity's relationship with nature in books, articles, and essays. His most recent books include: Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, published by Simon and Schuster in Feb. 2006 (and serialized in Fortune Magazine, January 2006), The Octopus and the Orangutan: New Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity, and The Parrot's Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. The Parrot's Lament was serialized at cover length in TIME. In 2002, Plume published an updated version of The Future in Plain Sight, which was described by The Rocky Mountain News as "the most important book of the decade" when it was first published in 1998.


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Some recent major articles include “Seeing the Forest: Conservation on a Continental Scale,” in the July/August 2004 issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS. This article, co-authored with Thomas Lovejoy and J. Daniel Phillips, offered an easily deployed, low-cost way of conserving vast systems such as the Congo rainforest. Another recent major article was “The Nature of Cuba,” published in May 2003 as a cover story in SMITHSONIAN.

During the 1990s, much of Linden's magazine writing was published in Time, which he joined in 1987 with the responsibility to conceive of, report, and write major stories on the environment and science.

Linden wrote the central story for TIME's first global special issue, "How to Save the Earth," published on Earth Day 2000. From 1988 through 2000, Linden has played a major role in all of TIME's special issues devoted to the environment including the international special issue, "Our Precious Planet,” and "Endangered Earth," in TIME's celebrated planet-of-the-year issue published in 1989.

Apart from his work on TIME's special issue, Linden's recent major articles for TIME include articles on climate change and a new threat to the Amazon rain forest in 2000. Both "Arctic Meltdown" and "The Amazon Tinderbox" ran as international cover stories and in shorter form in the U.S. edition. The Amazon story revisited an issue Linden first covered in his 1989 cover story, "Torching the Amazon."

Linden has consulted with the U.S. State Department, and the United Nations Development Program. In 2001 he was named as one of four recipients of the first Poynter Fellowship at Yale University to be awarded for environmental journalism.

Apart from his writing, Linden speaks frequently about nature, environment and the future. He served as a final judge for the 2003 Jackson Hole Film Festival. He also serves on several nonprofit boards and advisory committees, and as an independent director of three companies.

 

 


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James Gustave (Gus) Speth
Dean, Yale School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies

 

James Gustave (Gus) Speth as born in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1942. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1964, attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and graduated from Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal, in 1969, and was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He served in 1969 and 1970 as a law clerk Supreme Court Justice, Hugo L Black.

He served from 1977 to 1981 as a Member and then for two years as Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. As Jimmy Carter's CEQ Chairman, he was a principal advisor on matters affecting the environment and had overall responsibility for developing and coordinating the President's environmental programme.

In 1981 and 1982 he was Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. From 1970 to 1977 Mr. Speth was senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization he co-founded.

He founded the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental think tank, in 1982, and served as its president until January 1993. He was a senior advisor to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team, heading the group that examined the USA's role in natural resources, energy and the environment.

In 1991 he chaired a USA task force on international development and environmental security which produced the report Partnership for Sustainable Development: A New U.S. Agenda. In 1990 he led the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development which produced the report Compact for a New World.

 


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From 1993 to 1999, he served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme; he served as Special Coordinator for Economic and Social Affairs under Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and also served as Chair of the United Nations Development Group.

He is now the Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean and Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, Connecticut. His latest book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, has been reviewed in the Sunday, 27 April 2008 edition of the Washington Post.

Throughout his career, Dean Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation’s Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America’s Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Environmental Law Institute, and the Blue Planet Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Clark University, the College of the Atlantic, the Vermont Law School, and Middlebury College.

 



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Tim Weiskel
(Panel Chair)
Harvard University Extension School

&

Research Director

Cambridge Climate Research Associates (CCRA)

TIMOTHY C. WEISKEL, graduated magnum cum laude from Yale University. He trained as a social anthropologist and an historian as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Following field work in West Africa he received his D.Phil. from Oxford University and returned to the United States to teach anthropology and history at Williams College, Yale University and Harvard.

His research concentrates upon belief systems within cultures and how core cultural beliefs can either facilitate change or block change over time.

In particular, he has examined how dominant belief systems serve to impede or enable different cultures to perceive the changing environmental challenges that confront us all as a human family. To pursue this work he co-founded The Climate Talks Project in 2001 along with Professor William Moomaw of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. This group has convened scholars, business leaders, NGO activists, journalists and concerned citizens to discuss effective means of mobilizing civil society to respond to the evolving global climate crisis.

Dr. Weiskel currently teaches online courses on global climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice in the Sustainability and Environmental Management (SEM) program through Harvard's Extension School. These courses focus upon the ideological and conceptual barriers to transforming our current industrial culture based upon metaphors of continuous consumption and perpetual growth into new cultural forms based instead upon metaphors of stability, justice and global sustainability.

Since 2008 Dr. Weiskel has taught an annual "Global Climate Update" course for graduate students and public health officials at The Cyprus International Institute (CII) for the Environment and Public Health as part of an advanced degree program established by the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) in cooperation with the Harvard School of Public Health.

Inspired by the life-long example of Bill Coffin and the impressive achievements of fellow classmate, Daniel Yergin (Yale, '68), who's Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) has enabled his clients and the wider world to understand energy issues over the last quarter century, Weiskel convened the Cambridge Climate Research Associates (CCRA).   In addition, Dr. Weiskel founded Food-Matters.TV and helped to organize the internet-based Clearing House of Environmental Course Material to provide current news and information to students and fellow faculty working in the realm of environmental science, environmental ethics and the conditions required for free and objective inquiry into the environmental future facing the human community.

Through these organizations Dr. Weiskel consults with individuals, groups and institutions to ceate on site and online training programs for schools, universities, corporations, municipalities, and national governments. The goal is to assist these organizations in analyzing the climate impact of global carbon consumption and help them envision the necessary transformations we must all now undertake to enable the human community to move to a post carbon-fueled world.