Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Claire Skinner is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles' London office and leader of the Europe region. She is a member of the firm’s CEO & Board, Industrial, and Private Equity practices. Claire has more than 20 years of experience building executive and non-executive teams for a wide range of clients involved in energy, utilities, clean technology, and sustainability. Additionally, she has substanti...

This episode of Cleaning Up is based on a March 2022 blog post written by Michael for BloombergNEF. https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-the-quest-for-resilience-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/ We would like to thank BloombergNEF for allowing us to record it.  Further reading: “This Isn’t a Natural Disaster”: Climate Scientist Michael Mann on Deadly Tornadoes in 8 States (December 2021) https://www...

Tom Steyer is Co-Executive Chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions, a mission-driven investment platform. Tom Steyer founded and ran Farallon Capital Management, a multi-strategy global investment business based in San Francisco, from 1986 until 2012. During that period, it grew assets from $6mm to $36bn. Over the same time, Tom was also a partner and Investment Committee member at Hellman & Friedman...

Emma Pinchbeck has been the Chief Executive of Energy UK, the trade association for the energy industry since July 2020.  Before taking up this post she was Deputy CEO of RenewableUK for 4 years and was the Head of Climate Change at WWF-UK.  Emma holds an MA from the University of Oxford. She is a competitive rower and in 2018 ran her first marathon, raising money for WWF.

Rhian-Mari Thomas is Chief Executive of the Green Finance Institute. The Institute sits at the nexus of the public and private sectors, the Green Finance Institute convenes and leads sectoral coalitions of global experts, that identify and unlock barriers to investment towards impactful, real-economy outcomes. The Green Finance Institute is backed by the UK Government and City of London Corporatio...

Professor Emily Shuckburgh OBE is Director of Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge's major climate change initiative.   Emily is a climate scientist and mathematician, a Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy and a Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey. She leads the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the...

Inger Andersen is Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. From 2015 until 2019, Inger was the Director-General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  Before that she worked at the World Bank for 15 years in roles such as Vice President of the Middle East and North Africa; Vice President for Sustainabl...

Tommaso Demarie (PhD) is co-founder and CEO of Entropica Labs, a company working on optimisation with and for quantum computing.   Tommaso has 12 years of experience in the field of quantum information and computation. Before founding Entropica, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies and Singapore University of Technology and Design.   His research int...

David Turk serves as Deputy Secretary in the US Department of Energy. Before joining President Biden’s administration in 2021, David spent over 4 years as Deputy Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). He was Head of Strategic Initiatives Office and Head of Energy Environment Division. During the Obama administration David worked at the Department of Energy (Deputy Assistant S...

Francesco Starace is Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of Enel.   Before becoming the CEO in 2014, Francesco spent 14 years at Enel, holding a number of executive positions - between 2008 and 2014 he led Enel’s renewable power generation business, Enel Green. Prior to this role which included overseeing the businesses’ IPO. Before 2008 Francesco was, inter alia,  Head of Business Power a...

Lieutenant General (Retd) Richard Nugee is the lead author of the UK Ministry of Defence’s Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach report. Richard spent over 35 years in the military. He was first commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1985. During his service he reached the rank of Lieutenant General and was the Chief of the Defence People between 2016 and 2020. He led the works on...

Nathan Gambling is a heating engineer and lecturer who has taught in colleges and a prison. As well as industry, teaching and assessing qualifications he has a psychology degree in Behavioural studies and is regarded as a leading expert around training and the learning process within plumbing and heating.   He has a remarkable heritage within the heating industry: As central heating first started...

Pasquale Romano is President and Chief Executive Officer of ChargePoint and a member of the company’s board of directors. Pasquale joined ChargePoint in February of 2011, bringing more than 30 years of technology industry leadership and executive management experience to the company. He is currently a board member for Levitate Acquisition Corporation. He co-founded 2Wire which was acquired by Pace...

Ban Ki-moon was the 8th Secretary General of the UN. He is the Chairman of Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future. In April 2019, Mr. Ban was elected as the Chairman of Presidential National Council on Climate and Air Quality (NCCA) (2019-2021). In April 2018, Mr. Ban was elected as the Chairman of Boao Forum for Asia. In January 2018, Mr. Ban, along with former President of Austria Mr. Heinz...

Peter Sweatman is the founder and Chief Executive of Climate Strategy & Partners (@ClimateSt and www.climatestrategy.com), a strategic consulting group in Clean Energy, Clean Technology Innovation and Energy Efficiency working with leading companies and policymakers in the global energy transition Peter is also Chairman and founder of Energy Efficiency Capital Advisors (www.eecapadvisors.com) an e...

Amory Lovins is Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Apart from co-founding the Institute in 1982 he served as its Chief Scientist between 2007 and 2019.  Amory is a an author of 31 books and more than 700 papers, he has advised major firms and governments on energy in over 70 countries for more than 45 years. He has taught at ten universities, most recently the Naval P...

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL),  where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). She is winner of international prizes including the Grande Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2021, Italy's highest civilian honour, the 2020 John von Neumann Award,...

David Sandalow is the Inaugural Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy and co-Director of the Energy and Environment Concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He founded and directs the Center’s U.S.-China Program. David is as a director at Fermata Energy and senior advisor to APL. He is a member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize Selection Committ...

Dan Doctoroff is the Founder and CEO of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company that works with cities to address key urban problems. Before founding Sidewalk Labs in 2015, Dan spent 6 years working  at Bloomberg L.P. first as President and since 2011 as CEO. He joined that company after leading the post 9/11 recovery of the New York city for 7 years as its Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Reb...

Guy Turner is the founder and CEO of Trove Research and an expert on carbon markets. Guy has 30 years’ experience in research and strategy in sustainability and the energy transition. He spent his first 15 years in consulting advising companies and governments on a wide range of sustainability issues. In 2006 he joined New Energy Finance (NEF) to create the carbon market research business (New Car...

Glen Peters is Research Director at Center for International Climate Research (CICERO) in Oslo. Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Industrial Ecology Programme at NTNU. Dr Peters is a worldwide authority on socio-economic drivers of emissions. He has performed pioneering work on how international trade intricately connects emission drivers in different countries. Recent work has f...

Damilola Ogunbiyi is the CEO of Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All and Co-Chair of UN-Energy Mrs. Ogunbiyi has extensive experience in the energy space. Before joining SEforAll she was Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency, the first woman to be appointed to the post. Before that she was...

Professor Dame Julia King (Baroness Brown of Cambridge) DBE, FRS, FREng is an engineer, crossbench member of the House of Lords and Chair of The Carbon Trust. Julia started her career in academia as a Rolls-Royce fellow at University of Cambridge and was involved in teaching and research for 16 years, before moving to business. Between 1994 and 2002  she held a number of managerial positions at Ro...

Todd Stern is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, best known for leading the US delegation at COP21 in his capacity as Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State. Todd’s political career started in 1993, when he joined President Clinton’s administration. Between 1997 and 1999, he led the US government efforts on global climate change – he was the senior White House negot...