Rick Duke

Rick Duke is president of Gigaton Strategies and a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he served as special assistant to President Obama, helping to craft the 2013 Climate Action Plan and driving its domestic and international implementation. In that role, his domestic priorities spanned the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, the 2015 budget deal to achieve long-term extensions to renewable energy tax credits, DOE’s appliance standards program, regulations on non-CO2 gases, and measures to bolster lands sector carbon sinks and cut agricultural emissions.

His international work in support of the Paris Agreement included defining the United States’ 2025 emissions reduction target for the November 2014 leader-level joint announcement with China that jump-started the Paris negotiations process; bilateral engagement with Mexico and other major economies on their respective Paris Agreement emission reduction targets; and two U.S. Biennial Reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He also served as the White House lead to negotiate the landmark Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down hydrofluorocarbons as well as a global market-based measure to offset growth in international aviation emissions from 2020 under the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Finally, he led the team that authored the U.S. Mid-Century Strategy to achieve deep decarbonization by 2050.

During the first term of the Obama administration, he served as deputy assistant secretary for climate policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, including helping to launch the Clean Energy Ministerial and contributing to first-term policies such as the social cost of carbon, the mercury and air toxics standard, and the clean energy standard legislative proposal.

Previously, he launched the Center for Market Innovation at Natural Resources Defense Council. As an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, his projects included managing development of the firm’s first global greenhouse gas abatement curve.

He holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where his doctoral work focused on the economics of public investment in clean energy.

Affiliations:

• Gigaton Strategies, LLC, principal
• The Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy, American University, advisor
• Rhodium Group, senior advisor
• Schatz Energy Research Center, advisory board

EDUCATION

• Ph.D., Princeton University, 2002
• M.A., Princeton University, 1997
• B.A., Brown University, 1992