William Scott Becker
Executive Director

Bill Becker, is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), an initiative of Natural Capitalism Solutions to help the President of the United States take decisive action on global warming and energy security.

PCAP has submitted more than 200 policy and program recommendations to the Obama Administration, many of which were adopted during the President’s first year in office.

Bill launched PCAP in January 2007 at the University of Colorado Denver. Prior to that he was the Central Regional Director for the U.S. Department of Energy, where he spent 15 years administering programs to accelerate the use of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. He is a national expert on sustainable community development and on public policy related to clean energy and global climate change.

Throughout his career, he has specialized in helping disaster-affected communities engage in “sustainable reconstruction.” As the editor of a small-town newspaper in Wisconsin in the 1970s, Bill proposed and helped implement a pioneering project in which the rural village of Soldiers Grove relocated from a floodplain and built the nation's first solar village. The project has been featured in the television documentaries Solar Town USA and River Town , as well as in several books, including two authored by Becker: Come Rain, Come Shine, and The Making of a Solar Village. Thirty years after completion, the Soldiers Grove project is regarded as a model of climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

After the Great Flood along the Mississippi River in 1993, Becker led a team of sustainable development experts that helped two communities relocate from the floodplain and rebuild on higher ground using sustainable designs and technologies. Both projects were recognized as prototypes by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development during the Clinton Administration. In 1996, Becker founded and directed DOE's Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development and its Smart Communities Network web site, the "granddaddy" of sustainable community resources on the internet.

More recently, Bill was part of a three-person expert team commissioned by the State of Louisiana to help residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans plan their recovery after Hurricane Katrina. In 2005, he advised the Government of Thailand on sustainable reconstruction following the tsunami that devastated coastal areas of the country. Also in 2005, he organized and led a team of US experts to Beijing to advise Chinese officials on the "greening" of the Olympic Village for the 2008 Games.

In 2006-2007, Bill organized a series of four “national leadership summits” to advance sustainable development policy and practice in the United States. Hosted by the Johnson Foundation at its Wingspread Conference Center in Wisconsin, the summits engaged dozens of the nation’s top experts in energy policy, natural resource stewardship, community development and other disciplines, and created the “Wingspread Principles on the U.S. Response to Global Warming”. The Principles have been endorsed by many of America’s leaders in energy and climate policy.

Today, Bill directs two projects in addition to PCAP: the Central Appalachia Prosperity Project, which is helping people in that coal-dependent region develop a roadmap to a more sustainable economy; and The Future We Want, which employs state-of-the-art communications technologies to help the public envision life in a low-carbon, sustainable society. He is a frequent guest columnist for several prominent blogs including Huffington Post, SolveClimate, Climate Progress, The Environmentalist, and Celsius.

During his diverse career, Bill has served as a war correspondent for the U.S. Army in South Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star medal; writer/photographer for the Associated Press; publisher of his own weekly newspaper in rural Wisconsin; editorial writer and columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, WI.; associate director of the Wisconsin Energy Extension Service; research director for the Wisconsin State Senate; executive assistant to the Wisconsin Attorney General; Counselor to the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, DC; and communications director for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. He has served as an adjunct faculty member and project leader with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Colorado School of Mines, as well as the University of Colorado.

Bill is in high demand in Europe and the United States as a lecturer on energy, climate and sustainability issues, in venues that have included the United Nations and the UN’s 14th and 15th Conferences of the Parties in Poznan and Copenhagen, respectively. He is a member of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Climate Change Task Force and the Global Advisory Board of OgilvyEarth, the sustainability practice of the global communications company Ogilvy & Mather. He is a senior advisor to the Institute for Environmental Security at the Hague.

His latest book is “The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the Planet”, published by St. Martin’s Press in New York.

Bill and his wife Mary live in Golden, Colorado.