Ken Berlin is a senior fellow and the director of the Financing and Achieving Cost Competitive Climate Solutions Project at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. He has devoted his career to leadership on environment, energy, and climate-change issues. From 2014 to May 2022, Berlin was the president and chief executive officer of the Climate Reality Project, an organization founded and chaired by former US vice president Al Gore. He built the project into an international organization with offices in eleven countries and 130 chapters in the United States. The Climate Reality Project is dedicated to building public support for addressing the climate crisis. It has led multi-day trainings for over forty thousand climate activists, gathered the activists into a powerful international grassroots network, and activated them to work on climate-crisis issues and solutions.
Berlin was a co-founder with Reed Hundt in 2010 of the Coalition for Green Capital, an organization that works with governments at the international, national, state, and local levels to establish green bank finance institutions to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean transportation. Prior to that, he chaired the Environmental and Climate Change practices at the law firm of Skadden Arps where he was recognized as one of the leading climate-change attorneys in the United States and internationally. He has extensive legal and policy expertise on US and international environmental issues including clean energy; corporate compliance; environmental, social, and corporate governance; biodiversity; and forestry.
Berlin has served as chairman of the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the Center for International Environmental Law, the American Bird Conservancy, and Rare. He has served on the boards of other wildlife and environmental organizations and was involved with founding of the Alliance for Zero Extinction. He founded the Wildlife and Marine Resource s Section in the US Department of Justice.
Berlin is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School.