William Becker, 78, is a journalist, author, and former senior official in three U.S. presidential administrations. He is the founder and current executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which has developed recommendations since 2007 for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates on how to confront global climate change and lead America’s transition to clean energy.

Mr. Becker is an advisor to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington D.C., and a Senior Fellow at Natural Capitalism Solutions in Colorado. He is a former member of Mikhail Gorbachev’s International Climate Change Task Force.

Mr. Becker begain his journalism career as a 19-year-old combat correspondent for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. After leaving the military, he wrote for the Associated Press and became editor and publisher of his own weekly newspaper in a rural Wisconsin village. He proposed and helped implement the community’s pioneering project to relocate from a floodplain to higher ground rather than building a levee. In the process, the village built America’s first community heated with passive solar energy. In the years that followed while serving at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Mr. Becker worked with scores of diaster-affected communities to help them decide how to rebuild sustainably.

During his eclectic career, Becker was the editorial writer for the daily Wisconsin State Journal, research director for the Wisconsin Senate, executive assistant to the Attorney General of Wisconsin, Counselor to the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DOE, and director of DOE’s 13-state Denver Region.

In addition to numerous policy plans and reports, he is the author of The Indefensible Society, The 100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet, and The Creeks Will Rise: People Coexisting with Floods, a book about national disaster policy in the United States. He is the co-editor and a contributor to the sequel, Democracy in a Hotter Time, on the connection between democracy and global climate change.

He is a regular contributor to The Hill, one of America’s top political websites, and to the international magazine Meer, where his articles reach 6 million readers in six languages. Mr. Becker was honored in 2024 by Who’s Who in America.

Contact information: william@climatedemocracyinitiative.org