Michel Gelobter

Michel has over 25 years experience in energy, sustainability, and social justice work in policy-making, research, advocacy, and business. He is presently working with the Packard Foundation on sparking innovation in climate policy-making, and was most recently a founder of BuildingEnergy.com , a cloud-platform for the world building energy data. Prior, Michel Gelobter served as the Chief Green Officer for Hara, the leading enterprise energy and environmental management software startup, and remains Chairman/Founder of Cooler ( www.climatecooler.com ), a company whose mission is to connect every purchase to a solution for global warming. Michel also has a long history in research and teaching, policy, and advocacy. He is a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and presently serves on the Boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Ceres, as well as the Advisory Board of Vice-President Al Gore Alliance for Climate Protection.

He led Redefining Progress in designing the world most aggressive climate legislation (AB32 -- signed into California law in August of 2006 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), was a Congressional Black Caucus Fellow with the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee; Director of Environmental Quality for the City of New York, and founder and director of the Environmental Policy Program at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He also served as Issues Director for Mayor Dinkins'' first and successful bid for Mayor of New York. Michel earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D at U.C. Berkeley (where he wrote the first dissertation and taught the first-ever class on environmental justice) and is an alumnus of Deep Springs College. Michel holds two provisional patents for dynamic carbon footprinting and is the author of a number of academic and popular articles including "The Soul of Environmentalism".

Expertise

• Climate Change
• Global Grand Challenges
• Energy
• Sustainability