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Welcome to our sixth Common Sense Colloquy , a Q&A with Bob Perciasepe , the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) . RENEW PR President Ben Finzel works with Bob and his excellent team on the Carbon Capture Coalition (client). Bob is the very definition of the phrase “a gentleman and a scholar.” In addition to being smart, he is both savvy and personable. Bob’s career includes leadership roles in federal, state and city government as well as the

Welcome to our fifth Common Sense Colloquy , a Q&A with Kateri Callahan , the new President and CEO of CMC Energy Services and former President of the Alliance to Save Energy . RENEW PR President Ben Finzel had the privilege of working with Kateri twice on groundbreaking communications campaigns in support of the Alliance to Save Energy’s work on home and transportation efficiency. Kateri is a recognized and respected leader on energy efficiency. To paraphrase the Barbara M

Our Collaborations program continues to power our growth and provide terrific opportunities for us to work with interesting new clients on a variety of projects. This effort, which enables us to work with smart, creative, unique advertising, marketing, events and fundraising and government affairs experts, also makes our work that much more fun. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a new collaboration that we know fits this pattern of expertise + fun. Our newest collaboration

Welcome to our fourth Common Sense Colloquy , a Q&A with Bill Richardson , the former Congressman, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, former Secretary of Energy and former Governor of New Mexico. RENEW PR President Ben Finzel had the good fortune to work for Governor Richardson twice – as a congressional staffer and as a presidential appointee in the Energy Department. Governor Richardson is many things – a force of nature, a global “fixer” who has hel

Welcome to our third Common Sense Colloquy , a Q&A with Lisa Jacobson , the president of The Business Council for Sustainable Energy . We have been fortunate to work with Lisa and her terrific team on the launch of the annual Sustainable Energy in America Factbook for the past three years. Lisa is an energy policy rockstar and has headed BCSE for over a decade. This month, we asked Lisa to give us a sense of the work she does and share advice about communicating in the curre

Welcome to our second Common Sense Colloquy, a Q&A with Dan Reicher , the executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University . We have had the privilege of working with Dan on behalf of an initiative on carbon capture for the past two years. And nearly 20 years ago, agency president Ben Finzel worked with Dan when he was Assistant Secretary in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy

Hello and welcome back to our Fearless Fridays predictions. Before we offer a new prediction, let’s check in on Volume 2 from November 2017 . We predicted: Prediction 4: President Trump will "split the difference" on imposing solar tariffs in the pending Solarworld/Suniva solar trade case by imposing a smaller-than-requested tariff that allows him to try to please both sides. In this way, he'll be able to claim that he's going after China and supporting the plaintiffs by i

Welcome to our first Common Sense Colloquy, a Q&A with Marcene Mitchell of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) . Marcene is Global Head of Strategy and Business Development in the Climate Business Department of IFC . We had the privilege of working with Marcene and her team in 2016 on a partnership program designed to help improve linkages between IFC and key energy and environment constituencies. Last month, we reached out to Marcene to get an update on IFC’s climat

Today marks our third year in business. And what a three years it has been. From the optimistic feelings of 2015 to the hopeful caution of 2016 and the wild disappointment of 2017, the world is a vastly different place today than we ever would have imagined when we started on January 23, 2015. While there are certainly many reasons for hope as we begin 2018, there’s also a lot of concern about world peace, the future of American leadership in the world and the state of our en

Hello and welcome back to our Fearless Fridays predictions. Before we offer a new prediction, let’s check in on Volume 1 from August. We predicted: Prediction 1: We’ll see enactment of some form of carbon capture and storage policy by the end of 2017. [Full disclosure: We have a client in this space. This prediction is not based on any “insider” or other knowledge, but is simply a reflection of our insight from following this issue.] Prediction 2: We’ll see a renewed inter

One week ago, I had the opportunity to moderate a renewable energy communications panel at Renewable Energy Markets 2017 in New York City. Thanks to the contributions of three exceedingly wise panelists, it was a terrific, engaging conversation. Joining me on the panel on Monday, October 23rd were Kate Colarulli of CleanChoice Energy , Daniel Whitten of SEIA and Dan Reicher of Stanford . Our conversation touched on the challenges of communicating about renewable energy in

Hello and Happy Friday! With this post, we’re starting a new series of posts on this blog with our “Fearless Friday” predictions about developments in energy and environment policy, communications and/or issues. These predictions will be based on nothing more than our "best guesses" and our insight from 25+ years in Washington and experience working on related issues. That’s a long way of saying we could be way off with some (all?) of them. But that’s the fun, right? Here goe

Shortly after writing a blog post about Our Values in February 2015, I also wrote a blog post about Our Commitments . After Revisiting Our Values last week, I thought it would be helpful to confirm our commitments as well. Although the current administration is apparently still unsure if it will confirm our nation’s commitment to the Paris Agreement, we still believe acknowledging and addressing climate change is important. And that belief informs much of our work and guid

With today’s Executive Order rolling back many Obama-era regulations on climate, clean power and environmental protection, the Trump administration is opening a new front in their so-called “war” on President Obama’s climate change policies. We shouldn’t be surprised: candidate Trump said during the campaign this is what he’d do and he’s doing it. But it’s still jarring given how dramatic the changes will be once the Executive Order is fully implemented: with today’s action,

Today marks the second anniversary of RENEW PR . It’s been a fantastic two years and I’m excited for the next two and many more beyond. On our six-month anniversary, I wrote a blog post about six things I learned in my first six months in business . I just re-read that post and I’m happy to say that they all hold true today. Rather than repeating them, I thought I’d take the occasion of our second anniversary to add two lessons learned since that post in the summer of 2015.

Today we're launching our "new" website, or rather, the second iteration of our website. The new site has clearer titles - Team , Focus , Approach - and a new Clients page listing some of the wonderful organizations we've had the pleasure of working with in the past 19 months. We're also updating many of our case studies, and will soon be adding new ones reflecting work we've done recently. And we've moved our Collaborations to the same page as our Network Partners (the ne

As of today, we've been in business 19 months (we officially launched on January 23, 2015). In that time, we've worked with 19 clients. We're proud to say that several of those clients have worked with us before and many that hired us last year either continued our relationship into this year or hired us again this year for additional projects. To say that we've been lucky would be an understatement. We've been so fortunate to work with smart, committed, capable, focused org

In 2010, I had the distinct honor of working with a team of clients and colleagues (including Renee Rosenfeld of RENEW PR Network Partner Reverberate Media and Kristofer Eisenla of RENEW PR Network Partner LUNA+EISENLA media ) on the launch of the American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC). The AEIC was a group of seven leading CEOs who were committed to promoting the idea that energy innovation required U.S. leadership, specifically U.S. federal dollars devoted to energy

We’re excited to announce today that we’re expanding our collaborations program to include the brilliant public policy professionals at 38 North Solutions . Our collaborations program comprises partnerships between RENEW PR and leading public engagement firms providing complementary services to match our communications and public relations expertise with that of the other firms specializing in related areas such as video production, live broadcasts, fundraising, event pl

We started this agency because we’re passionate about restoring common sense to communications. We want to help business, organization and advocacy leaders communicate more effectively about the impact of their energy and environment business decisions on the global community, economy and environment. One of our principles of communication is clarity. We apply that standard to ourselves as well. We think it’s important to be clear about what we are committed to so that clie