Administration names Gavin Schmidt, Robert Bonnie, Sonal Larsen, Satyam
Khanna climate advisors (clockwise from top left)
President Joe Biden is continuing to build out an administration-wide
climate infrastructure with new appointments. This interagency “climate
cabinet,” anchored by National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy and Special
Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry in the White House, looks to
extend to every department. Here are the recent announcement for four
diverse agencies:
National Aeronautic and Space Administration: Gavin Schmidt,
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies in New York, will serve in the newly created position of senior
climate
advisor.
Schmidt has been GISS director since 2014. His
main research interest is the use of climate modeling to understand
past, present, and future climate change, and he has authored or
co-authored more than 150 research papers in peer-reviewed literature.
He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and was the inaugural winner
of the AGU Climate Communication Prize in
2011. He also was awarded NASA’s Outstanding
Leadership Medal in 2017. He has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from
Oxford University and a doctorate in applied mathematics from University
College London.
Securities and Exchange Commission: Satyam Khanna will serve as
Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Environmental and Social
Governance. Khanna was
most recently a resident fellow at NYU School
of Law’s Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance and served on
the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition’s Federal Reserve, Banking, and
Securities Regulators Agency Review Team. He was previously a member of
the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, where
he served on the Investor-As-Owner Subcommittee, and was a senior
advisor to the Principles for Responsible Investment. Prior to that, he
served as Counsel to SEC Commissioner Robert
J. Jackson Jr. Earlier in his career, Khanna was a member of the staff
of the Financial Stability Oversight Council at the U.S. Treasury
Department and was a litigation associate at the law firm McDermott Will
& Emery. He is a graduate of Columbia Law School and Washington
University in St. Louis. He was also a blogger at ThinkProgress for the
Center for American Progress Action Fund.
U.S. Department of Agriculture: Robert Bonnie was named Deputy
Chief of Staff for Policy and Senior Advisor,
Climate,
in the Office of the Secretary: Most recently Bonnie served as an
executive in residence at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental
Policy Solutions at Duke University. Previously, he served as Director
of the Farm and Forests Carbon Solutions Initiative at the Bipartisan
Policy Center, where worked to develop new initiatives to combat the
climate crisis through agricultural innovation. During the Obama
Administration, he served as Under Secretary for Natural Resources and
Environment and as a Senior Advisor to Secretary Vilsack for climate and
the environment. He worked at the Environmental Defense Fund for 14
years. Bonnie holds a master’s degree in forestry and environmental
management from Duke University, and a bachelor’s from Harvard College.
General Services Administration: Sonal Kemkar Larsen, formerly a
national advisor for the mayoral level City Energy Project
partnership
in Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker’s sustainability office. She was a
former official at both the White House Council of Environmental Quality
and at the Department of Energy. Previously she was a sustainability
consultant at the
United Nations Environment Program in Bangkok. She will play a role as
senior advisor on
Climate.
The first satellite designed
exclusively to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from space failed to
reach orbit during this morning’s launch,