Matt Renner

Matt Renner was born and raised in Berkeley and now lives in Richmond, California and is a father to an awesome four-year-old. He serves as Vice President of Seneca Solar, a new tribally owned renewable energy and Earth-healing solutions company. The company is owned and controlled by the Seneca Nation, which has tasked the company with profitably and equitably delivering innovative climate and renewable energy solutions that heal the Earth. After stepping down from his role as Executive Director, Matt serves as a board member of The Climate Mobilization a nonprofit organization working to initiate an emergency-speed, whole-society Climate Mobilization, to reverse global warming and to restore a safe climate. In his spare time, he pulls his son around in a trailer behind his ebike, works in the garden, and tries to bring media attention to the rolling disaster that is the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond. Matt has worked as a nonprofit executive in clean energy, climate policy, and journalism for over a decade, focusing on the near-term social and economic impacts of climate change. Matt earned his bachelor's degree in political science from UC Berkeley, where he was deeply inspired by the cognitive science and linguistics work of Professor George Lakoff. He began his career as an investigative reporter and senior editor with Truthout during the Bush administration, investigating the political interference inside the Department of Justice, examining the lies that brought about the war in Iraq, military contracting fraud, and trying to explain the 2008 collapse of the financial sector. He is proud to have been an initiating participant on day one of Occupy Wall Street in New York City, where his attention turned to the intersection between inequality and the unfolding Climate Emergency. After Occupy, he became the Executive Director of the World Business Academy, which has been working in the “business for good” movement since its inception in the early 1980s. His work there focused on arguing with capitalists and creating a new, sustainable and just paradigm in business via emerging approaches to finance, business model innovation, opportunities from the renewable energy transition, and the future of energy. He went on to focus on neighborhood- and regional-scale microgrid systems at the Clean Coalition, where he also worked on California energy policy.

Native communities will own the assets of the energy transition.