Bren School OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents

John Topping

President and Chief Executive Officer,

Climate Institute Former Staff Director, Office of Air and Radiation, US EPA

Friday, February 17, 2006

Bren Hall 1414

1:00-2:00 p.m.

John Topping who graduated from Dartmouth in 1964 and Yale Law School in 1967 was cited for work in the civil rights, minority business development and environmental areas that began in his student days at Dartmouth. During his senior year at Dartmouth, Topping, an International Relations major, gathered petitions in Lebanon, NH from neighbors of US Sen. Norris Cotton asking the Senator to vote for cloture to enable the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to come to a vote. While at Yale Law School he worked for passage of the Voting Rights act of 1965 and the next year co-authored a book analyzing the implications of this legislation for the growing Southern Republican parties as well as a policy proposal for a negative income tax to replace the welfare system. Following service as an Air Force JAG officer, he was involved in the launching of the national minority business program serving for three years as Chief Counsel of the Commerce Department’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise. In 1974 he was appointed to the DC Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights on which he still serves today. In Aug. 1976 Mr. Topping was given the President’s Award of the National Bar Association for “service to the minority legal profession. For the past two decades John Topping has worked in the environmental protection area serving as Staff Director of US EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation from 1983-1986 and then as President of the Climate Institute. While at EPA he was involved in efforts to phase out lead from gasoline, fund the studies that led to the banning of smoking on US domestic air flights and begin the risk assessment of CFCs that helped lay the groundwork for the Montreal Protocol. Under his leadership the Climate Institute has become a world-class policy organization.