Peter serves as the Manager of CIEIF. For the last 2.5 years he was Chair of the Board of Advisors of the U.S. NGO Methane Action (www.methaneaction.org, now merged with Spark Climate Solutions, www.sparkclimate.org). He has been an environmental, land use, consumer, and personnel law attorney and advocate since 1983. Peter received his law degree from the University of Puget Sound (now Seattle University) School of Law and also a Masters in Environmental Studies from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Peter currently serves as Senior Counsel at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). His career has centered on bringing the best science to bear in environmental protection efforts, as well as in federal litigation. He has extensive experience in EIA work having led the interagency coordination, public and stakeholder outreach, and EIS writing for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on a major endangered species recovery project, the reintroduction of the Mexican wolf subspecies in Arizona and New Mexico from 1992 – 1996. Then he was engaged in similar governmental and non-governmental consulting for several years afterwards.
Peter’s NGO positions in Washington, DC, since 2000 have been: Vice President for U.S. Government Policy at Conservation International; Director of International Conservation at Defenders of Wildlife; Of Counsel at the Center for Food Safety; and Staff Attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Prior to then he served as Attorney and Policy Analyst for the U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, and also was in private law practice. Peter has authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and reports in various areas of environmental law and policy. He has been invited to testify to Congressional committees four times.
He was a co-author, together with CIEIF’s Science Advisor, Renaud de Richter, and Tim Sturtz of ESA Consulting, of the first EIA study ever published on methane removal: Sturtz, T.; Jenkins, P.; de Richter, R. Environmental impact modeling for a small-scale field test of methane removal by iron salt aerosols. Sustainability. 2022. 14, 14060.