William S. Becker

William Becker began his career as a 19-year-old combat journalist in the Vietnam War. Afterward, he wrote for the Associated Press and published his own weekly newspaper in the rural village of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. Plagued by generations of floods, the village considered building a levee, the typical way the United States tried to control rivers. Bill proposed instead that the village move to higher ground. The move was completed eight years later as the nation's first passive-solar-heated community and a pioneer in "nonstructural" flood avoidance. It was Bill's formative experience in renewable energy, sustainable development, and dealing with floods by moving people instead of rivers. Today, many more communities are following that example.

In the years that followed, Bill spent 15 years as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he became an internationally-known expert on global climate change and renewable energy. After leaving DOE in 2007, he launched the Presidential Climate Action Project, where he has worked with many of the nation's prominent thought leaders to develop policy options for Presidents of the United States to confront global climate change. He continues leading that program today at age 73 from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.