William A. Nitze

Mr. Nitze currently serves as Chairman of Gridpoint, Inc., the Climate Institute, the Galapagos Conservancy, and Oceana Energy Company.  He founded the Gemstar Group, a non-profit that developed market-based approaches to global environmental problems, and served as its President from 2001 to 2005.  Prior to Gemstar, he served as Assistant Administrator for International Activities at the Environmental Protection Agency (1994-2001), where he made environmental security a focus of the Agency’s international work by establishing a formal working relationship among the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and EPA on environmental security issues. 

As President of the Alliance to Save Energy (1990-1994), Mr. Nitze led a broad coalition of business, government, labor, and consumer interests in supporting and implementing policies and programs to promote energy efficiency.  As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment in the Reagan and Bush administrations (1987-1990), Mr. Nitze was the principal working level negotiator on multilateral environmental issues ranging from trade in endangered species to climate change.  In 1988, Mr. Nitze played a key role in creating and organizing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

After leaving the State Department in early 1990, Mr. Nitze was a Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute, where he wrote a monograph entitled The Greenhouse Effect: Formulating a Convention.  Many of the elements discussed in this monograph were subsequently incorporated into the Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992.  From 1993-94 and in 2002, he taught a course on forming an international regime to address climate change at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. 

Prior to entering the public policy arena, Mr. Nitze worked at the law offices of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York and spent fourteen years at the Mobil Oil Corporation (1974-1987), where he served as Assistant General Counsel, Exploration & Producing Division, and General Counsel, Mobil Japan.  Mr. Nitze holds B.A. degrees from Harvard College and Wadham College, Oxford, and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.