Expert Speaker Series

Friis Arne Petersen - Denmark's Ambassador to the US, host of the COP15 UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen Dec. 2009

Colin Beavan aka NO IMPACT MAN - aka NO IMPACT MAN - The man who lived one year with zero carbon impact--the extraordinary movie will be previewed on Climate Ride. Watch the trailer

Alison Gannett - Founder Save Our Snow Foundation, voted Outside Magazine's '08 Green All-Stars, US Champ Freeskier

Mike Tidwell - inspiring activist, writer and documentary filmmaker, President Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and his own home is fueled almost entirely by wind, solar and corn power

Mikael Colville-Andersen - Denmark's leading bicycle ambassador and advocate, accomplished writer, director, photographer and blogger who created the famous European blog Copenhagenize.com. Colville gives a passionate talk on cycling as an environ-mentally friendly, viable, and sustainable transportation alternative.

Wood Turner - the one climate scorekeeper you need to know, Executive Director Climate Counts

Ben Strauss - associate director at Climate Central, founding board member of Grist.org and founding director of the Environmental Leadership Program. Dr. Strauss holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University and will challenge us to think about the psychology of climate change communications.

Roz Savage - first woman to row across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, environmental activist, United Nations Environmental Program Climate Hero

Garett Brennan - 1% for the Planet & Clif Green Notes artist, Executive Director of 2008 and 2009 beneficiary Focus the Nation.  Check out his Americana/roots band, The Great Salt Licks, that played at Climate Ride 2009!

Josh Dorfman, The Lazy Environmentalist -watch his new Sundance show

Betsy Taylor - President of 1Sky and founder of the Center for the New American Dream

Marcus Schmidt - Germany Trade and Invest

Keith Laughlin - President of Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Alisa Gravitz -- Executive Director of Green America

Jason Kowalski - Policy Analyst, 1Sky

Adrien Benepe - NYC Parks and Recreation Commissioner

Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Oregon

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire

Senator Benjamin Cardin, Maryland

Congressman Edward Markey, Massachusetts

Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Ohio

Congressman Lloyd Doggett, Texas

Mike Eckhart - President, ACORE, American Council on Renewable Energy

Janet Larsen - Director, Earth Policy Institute

Randy Swisher - Executive Director, AWEA, American Wind Energy Association

David Kroodsma - Stanford-trained climate expert who pedalled 21,000 miles to research and raise awareness of climate change.

Elliot May - Director of Strategic Partnerships, Reverb greens huge music tours and unites musicians and fans to reduce their impact. Reverb has greened several tours including Jack Johnson, John Mayer, and Cold Play.

Fernando Migliassi - Eco-Technologies Group - a look at pursuing new technologies such as sequestering carbon by advancing the commercialization of Biochar for farming and agriculture.

2010 Speakers will be announced in August. Stay tuned.

Get to know our 2010 speakers below.  All of these experts will participate in our evening speaker series AND ride alongside the Climate Riders!  (More speakers will be announced in late August, so be sure to check back.)

Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist and social activist whose work explores the detritus of American mass culture. His best-known series, titled "Running the Numbers," depicts the staggering statistics that define contemporary America, in huge intricately detailed panels as large as thirty feet wide.  See Chris's amazing TED talk here.

These compelling works invite the viewer to walk up close and see every detail as a metaphor for the role of the individual in our hypermodern society. Chris's work is exhibited widely in the US and Europe, and has been featured in magazines, newspapers, weblogs, documentary films and television programs all over the globe. He lives in Seattle with his wife the poet Victoria Sloan Jordan, and his son Emerson. 

David Helvarg 

David Helvarg is President of the Blue Frontier Campaign and the author of four books, Blue Frontier, The War Against the Greens, 50 Ways to Save the Ocean and Rescue Warriors. He's editor of the Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide, organizer of several ‘Blue Vision' Summits for ocean activists, and winner of Coastal Living Magazine's 2005 Leadership Award and the 2007 Herman Melville literary Award.

Helvarg worked as a war correspondent in Northern Ireland and Central America, covered a range of issues from military science to the AIDS epidemic, and reported from every continent including Antarctica. An award-winning journalist, he produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries for PBS, The Discovery Channel, and others. His print work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, LA Times, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Sierra, and The Nation. He's done radio work for Marketplace, AP radio, and Pacifica. He's led workshops for journalists in Poland, Turkey, Tunisia, Slovakia and Washington DC. He is a licensed Private Investigator, body-surfer and scuba diver.

Hunter Lovins

L. Hunter Lovins is President and founder of the Natural Capitalism Solutions (NCS). NCS educates senior decision-makers in business, government and civil society to restore and enhance the natural and human capital while increasing prosperity and quality of life. In partnership with leading thinkers and Implementers, NCS creates innovative, practical tools and strategies to enable companies, communities, and countries to become more sustainable.

Trained as a sociologist and lawyer (JD), Hunter co-founded the California Conservation Project (Tree People), and Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years.  Lovins has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. She has consulted with large and small companies including the International Finance Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Interface, Clif Bar, and Wal-Mart. Governmental clients include the Pentagon, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and other agencies, numerous cities, and the governments of Jamaica, Australia, and the U.S. She has also served an advisor to the Energy Minister of the Government of Afghanistan. 

Recipient of such honors as the Right Livelihood Award, Lindbergh Award and Leadership in Business, she was named Time Magazine 2000 Hero of the Planet and in 2009 Newsweek dubbed her a "Green Business Icon." She has co-authored nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 book, Natural Capitalism, 2006 e-book Climate Protection Manual for Cities, and the 2009 Transforming Industry in Asia. She has served on the boards of governments, non- and for profit companies.

Hunter's areas of expertise include Natural Capitalism, sustainable development, globalization, energy and resource policy, economic development, climate change, land management, and fire rescue and emergency medicine. She developed the Economic Renewal Project and helped write many of its manuals on sustainable community economic development. She is currently a founding Professor of Business at Presidio Graduate School, one of the first accredited programs offering an MBA in Sustainable Management.

Dr. Philip Duffy

Philip Duffy is Chief Scientist at Climate Central, Inc. and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a physicist and manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked for 22 years. Dr. Duffy has worked in climate research for 20 year, primarily in modeling and analysis of observations. His current focus is on working with stakeholders to incorporate climate change into real-world decisions.

Dr. Duffy has won numerous honors, including the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared for his involvement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers on many aspects of climate science, atomic physics, and astrophysics. Dr. Duffy holds a BS degree in astrophysics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford. Dr. Duffy was co-captain of the Stanford Cycling team in 1982-1983.

Dan Fagre

Daniel Fagre is Research Ecologist and Climate Change Research Coordinator for the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center of the U. S. Geological Survey. He is stationed at Glacier National Park, Montana and is a faculty affiliate at the University of Montana, Montana State University, and several other universities. He's worked for the past 15 years with many staff, partners and collaborators in the Northern Rocky Mountains to understand how global-scale environmental changes will affect our mountain ecosystems. His diverse research programs have addressed glaciers, avalanches, amphibians, alpine plants, paleoclimates, snow chemistry and ecosystem dynamics of bioregions.  

Dan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and has held positions in universities and several federal agencies. He helped establish the Western Mountain Initiative, a program to tie mountain science across different areas, and is active in several international science networks that address mountain issues. He co-authored a book on national parks and protected areas published in 2005 and another on mountain ecosystems in 2007. He recently received the Director's Award for Natural Resource Research from the National Park Service and serves on the Montana governor's advisory board for climate change.

Roz Savage

Roz Savage is a British ocean rower, author, motivational speaker and environmental campaigner. She has rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean and is attempting to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific.

A latecomer to the life of adventure, Roz Savage was previously a management consultant and project manager at an investment bank, before realizing in her mid-thirties that there might be more to life than a steady income and a house in the suburbs. In 2005, she competed in the 3,000-mile Atlantic Rowing Race, the first solo woman ever to compete in that race and the sixth woman to row solo across an ocean. In 2008 she became the first woman to row solo from California to Hawaii. In 2009 she continued her Pacific bid by rowing from Hawaii to Kiribati. The third and final stage of her Pacific row takes place in Spring 2010, when she will attempt to row from Kiribati to Australia.

Roz Savage is a United Nations Climate Hero, a trained presenter for the Climate Project, and an Athlete Ambassador for 350.org. She is supported by the Dot Eco campaign and the Blue Planet Foundation. Her Pacific row is a project of the Blue Frontier Campaign and she is an Ambassador for the BLUE Project.

She has been listed amongst the Top 20 Great British Adventurers by the Daily Telegraph, the Top 10 Adventure Twitters by Outside Magazine.  Roz's inspirational book about her Atlantic row, "Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean", is published in the US by Simon & Schuster.

Jenn Fox

Jenn Fox is the Director of Strategic Planning at ClimateWorks. She formerly worked in the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. From 1998 to 2007, she worked for Energy Solutions on energy efficiency-related policy development. Ms. Fox wrote the first Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Plan for the city of Oakland, including performing baseline analysis and projections for the transportation, solid waste, and energy sectors.

In 1996, Ms. Fox was awarded a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Service Medal for work on the Puna Geothermal Facility and California air quality implementation plans. Her work at EPA focused on air pollution control in California's Central Valley and rule making for national emissions trading. She has worked domestically and internationally to apply science in resource conservation policy, including research as a Fulbright Scholar into the interplay between policymakers, engineers, geologists, and corporations in hydroelectric decisions. Ms. Fox is president of the board of directors of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from Stanford University.

Keegan Eisenstadt

Keegan Eisenstadt is president and CEO of ClearSky Climate Solutions. He has over 17 years of international environmental consulting experience. He is actively involved in the design and implementation of climate change mitigation projects; carbon credit monitoring and accounting; marketing and sales of carbon credits; carbon credit project certification; climate change adaptation; carbon forestry; forest management; forest conservation planning; protected areas management; agroforestry extension; forest hydrology; watershed analysis, spatial and quantitative modeling; ecological and environmental impact assessment; environmental education; community outreach; organizational and rural development. Mr. Eisenstadt has a particular focus on climate change and forestry resources, and is currently developing novel techniques and approaches for native species reforestation and carbon sequestration as part of ClearSky.

Other global climate change work includes corporate approaches to environmental and social responsibility through the reduction and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions; the implementation of certified emissions reduction and carbon-sequestration projects; national and international climate change policy assessment; and country adaptation strategies. He is working with actors involved with corporate social responsibility in promoting concepts of eco-efficiency and triple-bottom-line accounting, where corporations do well by doing good. Also, he has carried out natural resources management consulting activities throughout the world for private companies, multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. Mr. Eisenstadt is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Guarani.

Dan Garofalo

Daniel Garofalo is the University of Pennsylvania's first environmental sustainability coordinator and senior facilities planner, responsible for Penn's sustainability strategy, including energy conservation, waste management, green buildings, transportation and planning.  

Garofalo is a founding member of the U.S. Green Building Council and current chair of the Delaware Valley Chapter, and he was the founder of Community Design Collaborative, Philadelphia's pro-bono design center. He has served twice as a Peace Corps volunteer, first in Malawi in 1992-94, where he worked as the architect in charge of design for the capital city of Lilongwe, and in 2005 on a three-month assignment to Sri Lanka to assist in disaster recovery after the tsunami.  

Garofalo, a LEED certified architect, has been a planner and architect in Penn's Facilities and Real Estate Services Division since 2002. He received a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Virginia, a master's in architecture from Penn's School of Design and a master's in government administration from Penn's Fels Institute of Government.