A policy influencer, an entrepreneur, an academic and a journalist will offer their perspectives on how to make a difference in addressing climate change in the Cornell Climate Impact Speaker Series, a four-part series co-hosted by The 2030 Project: A Cornell Climate Initiative and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

The series will kick off Sept. 5 with Aliya Haq ’03, vice president for U.S. policy and advocacy at Breakthrough Energy. Haq’s talk is scheduled for 5 p.m. in G155 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall. Register for Aliya’s talk here.

Other speakers in the series:

• Entrepreneur Augustus Doricko – Oct. 3 at 5 p.m., G155 MVR Hall;
• Professor Constantine Samaras – Nov. 7 at 5 p.m., 184 Myron Taylor Hall; and
• Editor Robinson Meyer – Dec. 5 at 5 p.m., 184 Myron Taylor Hall.

“We are thrilled to be welcoming such an accomplished range of guests across government, advocacy and the private sector,” said Ben Furnas ’06, executive director of the 2030 Project. “The speaker series is designed to bring fresh voices of practitioners to campus – influential people working on addressing the challenges of climate change in this decisive decade for climate action.”

Haq will discuss recently passed laws that have added approximately a half-trillion dollars in federal funding for clean-energy projects. The success of this new legislation – including the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – could face political, regulatory and infrastructure bottlenecks.

Breakthrough Energy, a private energy group founded in 2015 by Bill Gates, advocates for an ambitious climate policy agenda and accelerating the transition to a global clean-energy economy. Haq manages the development of policy ideas and frameworks to speed up clean technology innovation and deployment across multiple economic sectors, including power, industrial, buildings, transportation and agriculture.

She also oversees strategies around grantmaking, convening, policymaker education and communications to advance clean energy and climate policy.

Doricko is the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding geoengineering startup that aims – thanks to advances in drone technology, numerical weather modeling and radar algorithms – to create water abundance in the United States.

Doricko studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out in 2022 to start Rainmaker, which earlier this year raised a $6.3 million seed round. Rainmaker is based in El Segundo, California, a community that has been referred to as “the spiritual epicenter of the American deep-tech renaissance.”

Samaras is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and affiliated faculty in the Energy Science, Technology and Policy Program at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the pathways to clean, climate-safe, equitable and secure energy and infrastructure systems.

From 2021-24, he served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the principal assistant director for energy, chief adviser for energy policy and chief adviser for the clean energy transition.

Meyer is the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a climate news outlet that features deep reporting on emerging decarbonization trends such as electric vehicles, clean hydrogen and carbon capture, in addition to climate change and its impact on the economy, politics and society.

Meyer was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy and technology. 

Furnas said the goal of the speaker series is to keep climate change top of mind.

“We are looking to start conversations, bring our community of scientists, researchers and students together, and open up dialogues between practitioners and our scientists and researchers working on cutting edge climate challenges here at Cornell,” he said.

Cornell’s 2030 Project seeks real-world solutions to address the climate challenge this decade. Fueled by the collaborative spirit of Cornell’s faculty, the 2030 Project is helping to remove silos, activate research and leverage existing expertise across all disciplines to find solutions.