Reid Detchon is Executive Director of Energy and Climate at the United Nations Foundation. He is also the Executive Director of the Energy Future Coalition, a broad-based non-partisan public policy initiative supported by the UN Foundation that seeks to bring about change in U.S. energy policy to address three critical challenges related to the production and use of energy: 

• The political and economic security threat posed by the world’s dependence on oil.
• The risk to the global environment from climate change.
• The lack of access of the world’s poor to the modern energy services they need for economic advancement.

From June 1999 through December 2001 Reid served as Director of Special Projects in Washington for the Turner Foundation, managing a portfolio of major grants aimed at increasing the effectiveness of environmental advocacy and encouraging federal action to avert global climate change.

Previously he spent six years at Podesta Associates, a government relations and public affairs firm in Washington, D.C., where he was a principal. From 1989 to 1993 Reid served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Conservation and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. Previously he was principal speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Reid worked for five years in the U.S. Senate, advising Senator John Danforth of Missouri on energy and environmental issues and serving as his legislative director. He was a reporter for the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune from 1974 to 1980. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Bethesda, Maryland.