2014 Panelists
Lesley Stahl (moderator) has been a 60 MINUTES correspondent since March 1991. The 2013-14 season marks her 23rd on the broadcast. Prior to joining 60 MINUTES, Stahl served as CBS News White House correspondent. She has a collection of Emmy Awards for her interviews on FACE THE NATION and her 60 MINUTES reporting, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy given in September 2003.
Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and holds two faculty positions at Stanford. He is co-chair of Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which led the effort on the IPCC Special Report, "Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation." Field's research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale.
George P. Shultz served as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration (1982-89). Since 1989, he has been a Distinguished Fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is Honorary Chairman of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Advisory Council Chair of the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency at Stanford, Chair of the MIT Energy Initiative External Advisory Board, and Chair of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book, Issues on My Mind: Strategies for the Future, was published in 2013.
Bina Venkataraman is director of global policy initiatives of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a writer, and a lecturer at MIT. She is the former senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Executive Office of President Obama, where she led efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation to address climate change. She also served as senior advisor to the co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. She was previously a journalist at The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and will soon begin a new column on climate, science, technology for the Globe.
Alvaro Umaña is Senior Research Fellow at the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Center. He served as Costa Rica's first Minister of Energy and Environment and that country's ambassadorat the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, where Costa Rica introduced its carbon neutrality pledge to become the first climate neutral country by 2021. Umaña holds a doctorate in environmental engineering and a master's degree in economics from Stanford University.
JB Straubel is a co-founder of Tesla, where he oversees technical and engineering design. Prior to Tesla, he was the CTO and co-founder of the aerospace firm, Volacom, where he invented and patented a long-endurance hybrid electric propulsion concept. Straubel built an electric Porsche 944 that held a world EV racing record, a custom electric bicycle and a pioneering hybrid trailer system. He holds a bachelor's degree in energy systems engineering and a master's in energy engineering from Stanford University.
Tom Steyer is the President of NextGen Climate, an organization that acts politically to prevent climate disaster and preserve American prosperity. Before retiring from the private sector, Tom founded and was the Senior Managing Member of Farallon Capital Management. Tom serves on Stanford’s Board of Trustees, where he and his wife founded the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. Tom also founded Advanced Energy Economy, which works with businesses to make energy secure, clean and affordable.
