Board of Directors
For dates of upcoming Meetings of the Board of Directors, click here.
For our Governing Documents, click here.
Linda Adams, Chair
Secretary for Environmental Protection
California Environmental Protection Agency
Kathleen Brown, Secretary
Head of Public Finance for the West Region
Goldman Sachs & Co
Jeffrey Kightlinger, Treasurer
General Manager
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Jan Schori, Audit Committee Chair
Retired General Manager
Sacramento Municipal Utility District
Randy Armstrong
Environmental Issues Director
Shell Oil Company
Steve Corneli
Senior Vice President, Market and Climate Policy
NRG Energy
Dr. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz
President
National Institute of Ecology (INE), Mexico
Peter Liu
Founder & Vice Chairman
New Resource Bank
Nancy McFadden
Senior Vice President, Public Affairs
PG&E Corporation
Peter M. Miller
Senior Scientist
Natural Resources Defense Council, San Francisco, CA
Tim Profeta
Director, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Senior Associate Dean
Duke University
Dr. Stephan Schwartzman
Director, Tropical Forest Policy
Environmental Defense Fund
Carl Zichella
Regional Director
Sierra Club
Biographies
Linda Adams, Chair
Secretary for Environmental Protection
California Environmental Protection Agency
Linda Adams, former director of the California Department of Water Resources, was appointed in May 2006 as Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Adams oversees the environmental activities of the Air Resources Board, California Integrated Waste Management Board, State Water Resources Control Board, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, Department of Toxic Substances Control, Department of Pesticide Regulation, and the approximately 5,000 employees that serve the state’s diverse environmental programs. Secretary Adams is the lead negotiator on AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
During Ms. Adams’ 32 years of service to the State of California, she has acted in a number of key positions in both the Executive and Legislative branches. Ms. Adams joined Governor Davis’ staff in 1999 as Chief Deputy Legislative Secretary, where her primary responsibilities were negotiating legislation related to environmental protection and natural resources. After being promoted to Legislative Secretary, where she served as the Governor’s chief liaison to the Legislature, Ms. Adams retained her resources and environmental protection issues, while overseeing all legislative activities.
Previously, Ms. Adams served as a staff member to the State Legislature for 20 years in various positions. She served as chief consultant to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, chaired by Senator Jim Costa. For the State Assembly, she served as a consultant to the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife and the Committee on Local Government.
Kathleen Brown, Secretary
Head of Public Finance for the West Region
Goldman Sachs & Co
Kathleen Brown is Head of Public Finance for the West Region of Goldman, Sachs & Co. She has extensive experience in municipal finance and government, having served as Treasurer of the State of California, Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California, co-chair of the Presidential Commission on Capital Budgeting, and board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District. In addition to her public service and municipal finance background, she has spent a substantial part of her career in the private sector, first as an attorney in the Capital Markets Group with the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and then in the Investment Management Group at Bank of America, where she was President of the Private Bank. She currently serves on the boards of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the California Foundation for the Economy and the Environment, and the Forestar Real Estate Group. She’s a founding member of the California Women’s Foundation and has previously served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the California Endowment, the Los Angeles Library Foundation, and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. She holds a JD from Fordham University School of Law.
Jeffrey Kightlinger, Treasurer
General Manager
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Jeffrey Kightlinger is General Manager and Chief Executive Officer for The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. As General Manager, he is responsible for directing the activities of the District to fulfill Metropolitan’s mission of delivering high-quality water to 19 million residents in Southern California. The General Manager reports directly to the Board of Directors and provides leadership and management of the District’s public policies and strategic initiatives, assets and resources, and all administrative, operational and financial activities for Metropolitan. Prior to his appointment in 2006 as General Manager, he was General Counsel for the District directing the legal affairs of Metropolitan. Before joining Metropolitan in 1995, Mr. Kightlinger was in private legal practice representing a number of public agencies on environmental issues. He is a Governor’s appointee to California’s Bay Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force – Stakeholders Committee and a board member on the UCLA Continuing Education Sustainability Advisory Board, among other activities. Mr. Kightlinger earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley and a law degree from Santa Clara University School of Law.
Jan Schori, Audit Committee Chair
Retired General Manager
Sacramento Municipal Utility District
Jan Schori became General Manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in February 1994 after working as an attorney and general counsel for the utility, where she joined in 1979. She is vice chair of the American Public Power Association and is chair of the Large Public Power Council. Ms. Schori is a former president and a current board member of the National Business Council for Sustainable Energy and the California Municipal Utilities Association. A native Sacramentan, Ms. Schori earned her BA in political science from UC Berkeley and graduated from the UC Davis Martin Luther King School of Law specializing in environmental law.
Randy Armstrong
Environmental Issues Director
Shell Oil Company
James Randolph (Randy) Armstrong, Jr., Environmental Issues Director for Shell Oil Company, began his career with Shell in 1975. Mr. Armstrong has over 30 years environmental experience and has held various technical assignments in operations, engineering, health, safety and environmental. Mr. Armstrong has compliance and engineering experience in air, water and waste. He has been involved in environmental issues ranging from the Great Lake’s Basin study in the mid 70’s to his present role of coordinating Shell’s US activities on Climate Change. Past activities have included hazardous waste incinerator testing, biotreater design, groundwater recovery activities, landfill operations, and the implementation of Clean Air Act requirements. Mr. Armstrong is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University with a BS in Chemical Engineering. Randy is married, has two sons and resides in Kingwood, Texas.
Steve Corneli
Senior Vice President, Market and Climate Policy
NRG Energy
Steve Corneli is NRG Energy’s Senior Vice President, Market and Climate Policy. He is responsible for developing and advocating Company positions regarding climate change policy, and for integrating emerging climate policies with NRG’s commercial, power development, and energy market activities. He is active in the United States Climate Action Partnership and works directly with Congress and others to develop and pass national climate change legislation. Mr. Corneli previously served as NRG’s Vice President of Regulatory and Government Affairs and as its Director of Regulatory Policy.
Prior to joining NRG, Mr. Corneli served in the Minnesota Attorney General’s office as an energy policy analyst and then as the manager of the office’s utility consumer advocate division. He then worked at the law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard on behalf of utility and independent power producer clients, and was an adjunct faculty member of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Earlier in his career, he operated a 600 acre family farm in Wisconsin for more than a decade.
Mr. Corneli has a master’s degree in public affairs from the Humphrey Institute with a concentration in energy, environment and technology policy. He also has a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. John’s College and did coursework in the University of Minnesota’s doctoral program in Applied Economics.
Adrián Fernández Bremauntz
President
National Institute of Ecology, Mexico
Dr. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz has an extensive and distinguished career in environmental protection in Mexico and abroad. Since 1995, he has served in senior positions at the Mexican Environment Secretariat, including General Director for Environmental Management and Information (1995-2000) and General Director for Research on Urban, Regional and Global Pollution (2001-2005). He also was a member of the Bureau for Latin America at the Commission for Sustainable Development. For many years, he represented Mexico at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Environmental Performance of Countries work group, and he is now a member of the Climate Change Annex I Expert Group also at the OECD. His Climate Change team at the National Institute of Ecology (INE) is responsible for preparing Mexico´s National Greenhouse Gases Inventories and National Communications that are submitted to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change.
In March 2005, Dr. Fernández was appointed President of INE, the research and think tank agency within the Environment Secretariat in Mexico, and he reports directly to Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. He has a B.S. in Biology in Mexico and Masters Degree and a PhD from Imperial College in the UK.
Peter Liu
Founder & Vice Chairman
New Resource Bank
Peter Liu founded the New Resource Bank after nearly two decades of experience in the banking and energy industries. Mr. Liu had been a Senior Vice President and Vice President, respectively, of Credit Suisse First Boston and the Chase Manhattan Bank, where he completed $6 billion in financing transactions as well as provided corporate and strategic advisory planning. He has been a private investor and strategic advisor to several clean energy technology companies and currently serves on the Clean Technology Investment Advisory Boards of the California Public Employees Retirement System and the California Teachers’ Retirement System, respectively the largest and the 3rd largest pension funds in the United States. He is the co-founder and Vice-Chair of the China-US Energy Efficiency Alliance and serves on the board of the Roots of Change Fund.
Nancy McFadden
Senior Vice President, Public Affairs
PG&E Corporation
Nancy McFadden is Senior Vice President of Public Affairs for PG&E Corporation. She is responsible for managing the company’s federal, state and local government relations, and philanthropic and community initiatives, while helping guide its efforts to be a national environmental leader. Before joining PG&E, Ms. McFadden spent nearly two decades as a key legal, policy, and political strategist in Washington, DC and Sacramento, most recently as senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to Governor Gray Davis. Prior to working in Sacramento, Ms. McFadden served for eight years in the Clinton Administration as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore and general counsel for the US Department of Transportation. Ms. McFadden started her career practicing law with the firm of O’Melveny and Myers. Ms. McFadden has been appointed by the California State Senate and two governors to serve on the California Medical Assistance Commission. Ms. McFadden has a JD from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s degree from San Jose State University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts and the Women’s Foundation of California.
Peter M. Miller
Senior Scientist
Natural Resources Defense Council, San Francisco, CA
Born and raised in California, Peter Miller obtained his Physics degree from Reed College and Master’s degree from Dartmouth College. He has worked on energy and environmental policy for nearly 25 years.
Tim Profeta
Director, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Senior Associate Dean
Duke University
Tim Profeta came to Duke on June 1, 2005, as founding director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. Prior to his arrival, he served as Counsel for the Environment to Senator Joseph Lieberman. As Lieberman’s counsel, Mr. Profeta was a principal architect of the Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship Act of 2003. He also represented Lieberman in legislative negotiations pertaining to environmental and energy issues, as well as coordinating the senator’s energy and environmental portfolio during his runs for national office. Mr. Profeta has served as a visiting lecturer at Duke Law School, where he taught a weekly seminar on the evolution of environmental law and the Endangered Species Act. Before joining Lieberman’s staff, he was a law clerk for Judge Paul L. Friedman, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Dr. Stephan Schwartzman
Director, Tropical Forest Policy
Environmental Defense Fund
Anthropologist Steve Schwartzman lived with the Panará tribe in Mato Grosso, Brazil for a year and a half in the early 1980s and learned their unwritten language. He subsequently defended his PhD thesis on the group at the University of Chicago. Dr. Schwartzman worked closely with the emerging Amazon rubber tappers’ movement in the western Amazon starting in 1985, and twice brought rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes to the United States. Since 1991, Dr. Schwartzman has worked with the Panará people, and NGO partner the Instituto Socioambiental, to help the Panará in their successful effort to recover 495,000 hectares of their traditional territory and ensure its legal recognition and protection.
Since 2002, Dr. Schwartzman has worked with grassroots groups and NGOs for the creation of a reserve mosaic in the Terra do Meio region of the Amazon state of Pará. Between 2004 and 2008 the Brazilian government, in response to civil society advocacy, created ~8 million ha. of new parks and extractive reserves in the lawless frontier region. This established a continuous corridor of indigenous lands and conservation units of 26 million ha. in the Xingu river basin, the largest tropical forest reserves corridor in the world. Dr. Schwartzman leads EDF’s work with a consortium of Brazilian NGOs, grassroots organizations, government agencies and indigenous and traditional communities to implement and protect the reserves.
Dr. Schwartzman also initiated EDF’s efforts to create large-scale incentives for tropical countries to reduce their deforestation through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and in the emerging US emissions control regime, with Brazilian and other international partners. He leads EDF’s international work on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries.
Carl Zichella
Regional Director
Sierra Club
Carl Zichella is Sierra Club’s Director of Western Renewable Programs. He was the regional staff director for the Sierra Club’s California-Nevada-Hawaii regional office for eight years, directing 15 staff working on energy and climate change, coastal protection, wilderness and other issues. He is a 21 year veteran of the Sierra Club staff and previously served as the Sierra Club’s Midwest Regional Director for more than a decade. Mr. Zichella is a steering committee member of the California Apollo Alliance, a director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology (CEERT), a past director of the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization, and environmental representative on the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) and the Western Governs’ Association Western Renewable Energy Zone identification processes. He is an advisory board member for the Center for Employment in the Green Economy within the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley.