By Keemia Zhang
Facing a challenging federal landscape and an increasingly urgent climate crisis, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) strengthened its capacity to deliver effective and equitable policy solutions by welcoming three highly-respected leaders — Dan Adler, Craig Segall, and Alexis Pelosi ’00 — as new affiliate advisers.
With deep expertise in areas spanning climate finance, electric vehicle policy, and equitable housing, they will help CLEE continue to turn research into action, ensuring that California’s pioneering work serves as an actionable model for states across the U.S.
Eager for efficiency
Pelosi is a land use law attorney with over two decades of experience in the private and public sector, including serving as a senior advisor for climate at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Biden Administration.
Providing consulting services and strategic advice to companies and nonprofits on climate resiliency and sustainability in the built environment, she has spent most of her career focused on infill development — working with developers and communities to build location-efficient housing that reduces vehicle trips and invests in urban centers.
“We can address our housing crisis and our climate crisis at the same time by focusing on how we build and where we build,” says Pelosi, noting that an estimated 30% of all emissions come from the built environment. “At a time when we may not be reducing emissions in other sectors, we have an opportunity in the built environment to lean in and show how, through energy efficient housing and retrofits, we can meet our climate goals.”
Highlighting California’s work on building efficiency, she is excited to help CLEE share those lessons nationally to help reduce building emissions.
Climate resilience is a key priority for Pelosi, whose post-wildfire work in Los Angeles underscores how extreme weather driven by climate change is devastating communities. “We lose one month of new housing construction every year to extreme weather,” she says. “It’s time to prioritize resilience, reduce risk, and invest in our communities before disaster strikes.”
Working across sectors, Pelosi is interested in how innovations in finance, insurance, and the built environment can reduce risk, strengthen municipal finance, and protect communities, businesses, and residents. CLEE, Pelosi says, is in a unique position to help tackle these challenges: “I’m happy to be here and think strategically about different ways to approach old problems, new problems and help build a more equitable and resilient future.”
Climate strategist
Adler, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government graduate, has served in executive positions at multiple climate and clean energy organizations. He previously spent four years working in state government as a senior advisor and deputy director in the field of climate finance.
“I found that CLEE was driving some of the most sophisticated and integrated thinking, taking the best of academia and think tanks but also making it really policy-relevant,” Adler says. “When I left the government, I wanted a chance to make a contribution in some of the detailed policy areas that needed support, and CLEE is a great place to do it. I love the team, so when the chance emerged to find a footing here, I was very keen to take it.”
Adler has been a leader in the climate strategy space, encouraging practical economic benefits on a statewide level to support clean energy, development, and environmental projects.
“I was working on infrastructure development strategies for climate solutions, including green banks,” he says. “A lot of that work involved partnering with nonprofits, and some were engaged with CLEE around how to build the transmission grid more cost effectively, how to drive for more equitable development in the electric vehicle space, and how to do more clean energy charging across the grid.”
Adler is now the executive director of U.S. Green Bank 50, developing a financial framework to support crucial climate initiatives at scale.
“There’s a lot of smart thinking out there around climate and there’s obviously an incredible amount of technology innovation going on. We need the connectivity, we need the translational research — and the policy- and market-actionable insights at a moment when folks can do stuff with it,” he stresses. “CLEE puts the ‘do’ in the think-and-do tank, and I’m excited to help support it.”
California connection
Segall, a Stanford Law graduate, has lent his expertise to leadership roles across multiple prominent climate organizations, including the California Air Resources Board and Evergreen Action, and was instrumental in shaping California’s statewide electric vehicle policy.
Working with CLEE Executive Director Louise Bedsworth on issues from geoengineering to governance to California state policy, he calls his new role at the center “a great chance to engage with a really effective policy center.”
“I’ve been appreciative that Louise and CLEE both think outside of just pollution regulations,” says Segall, also an advisor to the Federation of American Scientists and NYU Law’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. “It’s really important to think about the climate crisis as an actual problem of government capacity. Louise and the CLEE team are thinking a lot about supporting the next round of political leaders in California with new ideas, and I think that’s really important.”
Noting that California is the world’s fourth-largest economy but that its emissions are a very small percentage globally, Segall sees the main goal as making things better for Californians in ways that are self-sustaining.
“The future most people actually want is: your kids can afford school, your rent doesn’t rise every year, ideally you don’t have a gas stove in your house that’s giving your kid asthma, and you don’t need gas to drive because the bus comes on time. California has the chance to do this,” he says.
In the face of political tension, climate doomerism, and federal overhaul, Segall points out that globally emissions have continued to fall in major developed economies for years, with promising trends in heavy-hitter countries like India and China, and that 95% of new additions to the U.S. grid in the last three to four years have been wind, solar, or battery.
“There’s always ways to keep making things better, and a lot of the ideas to do that come out of universities. The great public research institutions have always been like the backbone of the state and the country’s economic growth and social mobility,” Segall says. “CLEE is a vehicle on the path to make the state work better for everyone and the right kind of institution to do it, because it’s rooted in this tradition of actually supporting the infrastructure.”
This article was made possible by support from the Erin Ziegler Fund, an endowment for the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment within Berkeley Law.