Dan Esty
Professor - Yale Law and Environment Schools
Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments at Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management. He serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and co-director of the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance. Professor Esty is the author or editor of twelve books and dozens of articles on environmental protection, regulatory reform, energy policy, and sustainability metrics — and their connections to corporate strategy, competitiveness, trade, and economic success.
From 2011 to early 2014, Professor Esty served as Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection where he earned a reputation for fresh thinking and practical results. His policy innovations include the launch of Connecticut’s first-in-the-nation Green Bank to promote clean energy using limited public funding to leverage private capital and the “LEAN” restructuring of all of Connecticut’s environmental permitting programs to make the state’s regulatory framework lighter, faster, more efficient, and effective. Prior to taking up his Yale Professorship in 1994, Professor Esty served in a variety of senior positions at the US Environmental Protection Agency where he helped to manage the agency’s regulatory programs and negotiate the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. He also worked as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., where he did breakthrough work on the links between trade and environmental issues and the broader challenges of globalization.
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