A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Carl Pope served for eighteen years as the Executive Director and Chairman of the Sierra Club. He’s now the principal adviser at Inside Straight Strategies, looking for the underlying economics that link sustainability and economic development. He serves as a Senior Climate Adviser to Michael Bloomberg, and together they wrote Climate of Hope, published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2017.

While leading the Club, the organization’s membership and budget doubled.  It took the lead in setting aside more than 50 million acres of wild areas within the National Forest System, established a pioneering program to help support environmental champions in the electoral arena, and launched “Beyond Coal”, a ground-breaking campaign which blocked more than 80% of proposed new coal fired power plants, and went on to retire more than a third of the existing US coal power fleet. Pope also was one of the co-authors of California’s pioneering Proposition 65, protecting consumers and drinking water from toxic chemicals.

He was a founder of the Blue-Green Alliance and America Votes, and has served on the Boards of Ceres, the California League of Conservation Voters, As You Sow, the National Clean Air Coalition, and California Common Cause. He is currently a member of the US-India Track II Climate Diplomacy project of the Aspen Institute. He writes regularly for Bloomberg View and Salon. Mr. Pope is also the author of Sahib, An American Misadventure in India; Hazardous Waste In America; and co-author along with Paul Rauber, of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called “a splendidly fierce book.”