Rhea Suh

Rhea Sun Suh … became president of Natural Resources defense Council in January 2015, leading the nearly 500 scientists, attorneys, and policy experts that make NRDC one of the country’s most effective environmental action organizations.

Powered by the support of more than two million members and activists, NRDC creates solutions and enforces laws that preserve clean air and water, open spaces, public lands, and healthy communities for all Americans, regardless of income, ethnic heritage, or race.

Under her leadership, NRDC has helped steer high-level discussions that led to the historic global climate agreement in Paris; joined the citizens of Flint, Michigan, to ensure an end to the city’s toxic drinking water crisis; and stood united with a sea of social justice advocates as a presenting partner at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C.

Before joining NRDC, Suh served as the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior. She was nominated for the position by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2009. Suh led several cross-cutting initiatives at the department on federal land conservation, climate adaptation, international affairs, and youth programs. She was instrumental in launching a complex reorganization of the agency responsible for offshore oil and gas oversight in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She also spearheaded the creation of the department’s first chief diversity officer position.

Prior to her appointment to the Interior Department, Suh worked at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where she created and managed a $200 million program dedicated to environmental conservation and clean energy in the West. She developed the foundation’s strategy for reducing climate change emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. She also established the first-ever collaboration among nonprofits to coordinate conservation efforts across the Colorado River Basin—from the headwaters in Colorado to the delta in Mexico.

Suh developed similarly far-reaching programs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. While there, she designed the foundation’s clean energy and climate change initiative, and led the effort to create the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the most successful land-protection campaigns in North America. She also launched a portfolio designed to focus on environmental issues for underserved populations in the United States.

Suh earned her bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Barnard College and received a Fulbright Fellowship to research environmental movements in Seoul. She returned to the States and worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, then earned a master's degree in education, administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University.

With her expertise in environmental and public health solutions, Suh is a media commentator making frequent appearances in the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, NPR, and other outlets.

National Leading From the Inside Out Alum

Rhea Suh, Assistant Secretary for Policy, Budget and Management, US Department of the Interior, was a 2007 Rockwood Leadership Institute National Leading From the Inside Out Alum.

Education

• Barnard College Bachelor’s Degree, Environmental Science 1992.
• Harvard University, Master’s Degree, Education, Administration, Planning and Social Policy.

Obama appointment

In April 2009 Rhea Suh was nominatedby the Obama administration for the position of Assistant Secretary for Policy Management and Budget in the DOI and confirmed in May 2009.

Praising China

Rhea Suh visited China in 2016, for the Natural Resources Defense Council.;

That’s why I spent much of my recent visit to China learning more about what that country is doing to help fight this global scourge. NRDC has been working with China for 20 years. I wanted to get a firsthand look at the progress we’re making and the challenges ahead.

Rapid industrialization and decades of strong growth in China have come with enormous environmental challenges. Air pollution, for example, is blamed for 1 million premature deaths a year in China and for reducing life expectancy by nearly 25 months. In some of the country’s most heavily populated areas, more than 80 percent of the water from underground wells used in homes and factories and on farms has been polluted. And with its heavy dependence on coal, China alone accounts for 27 percent of the global carbon footprint.

What I saw on my trip, though, was a reminder that China is doing a lot to address its problems at home and to help fight climate change — starting with the wind turbines I saw from my train window as I traveled from Shanghai to Beijing.

China leads the world in clean power development from renewable sources like the wind and sun. Last year alone, China invested $111 billion — one-third of the world total — in wind, solar, and other renewable power sources.

The country’s leaders regard solar and wind power as strategic industries, and it’s easy to see why. That global market is huge. Some 64 percent of all the electricity-generating capacity added worldwide over the next 25 years will be powered by the wind and sun, Bloomberg projects, at an investment of nearly $7 trillion.

China has built the world’s largest high-speed rail system, part of which whisked me from Shanghai to Beijing in five hours on a smooth-as-silk ride at speeds that topped out at 186 miles per hour. Think of boarding a train in Washington, D.C., at breakfast time and arriving in Chicago in time for lunch.

China has invested more than $500 billion to build some 12,000 miles of high-speed railroad connecting nearly every city in the country with a population of half a million or more. The Chinese take four million high-speed rail trips every day, at a small fraction of the carbon footprint of equivalent air travel.

China’s electric utilities are urged by the government to collaborate with their customers to develop innovative ways to slow the growth in electricity demand. Zheng Qingrong, of the Shanghai Electric Corp., hosted me at the company’s gleaming new demand response center to explain a pilot project viewed as an early move in that direction. There, computerized technology is helping customers save money by shaving power consumption during periods when demand for electricity peaks. That means the company can serve more customers without building an excessive number of power plants.

China is also working to launch next year a cap-and-trade system that will create market incentives for Chinese industry to cut its carbon footprint, as the country’s special climate change envoy, Xie Zhenhua, explained to me in Beijing. Xie was a central player in global climate talks last year in Paris, where the United States, China, India, Brazil, and more than 180 other countries agreed to shift away, over time, from the dirty fossil fuels that are driving climate change and move to cleaner, smarter ways to power our future.

China has pledged to cap its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (sooner, if possible), and it’s beginning to make progress. For the first time since 1982 — essentially, the first time since China began to build a modern economy fueled by foreign investment — China has had back-to-back annual reductions in coal consumption. Its coal use fell 2.9 percent in 2014 and another 3.7 percent in 2015, even as its economy continued to grow — at a substantial 6.9 percent last year.

Here’s why China’s role is so important: China is doing something no other country in history has done. It is moving hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty and into the global middle class. And it is doing it over the span of a single generation.

That growth has fueled a seemingly insatiable demand for energy. Most of that demand is met by fossil fuels. China burns as much coal, for example, as the rest of the world combined.

China eclipsed the United States several years ago as the world’s largest emitter of the carbon pollution that’s driving global climate change. The country kicked out about 9.7 billion tons of carbon emissions last year. While that was down about 1.5 percent from the year before, China still accounts for 27 percent of the global carbon footprint. Add to the that U.S. share — another 15.5 percent — and the two countries together produce about 43 percent of all global carbon pollution.

That’s why fixing this problem starts with our countries, the United States and China. And it’s one more reason I’m so proud of the work NRDC has done in China since first starting our clean energy efforts there 20 years ago.

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