Kate Konschnik is a former environmental litigator and energy policy expert focused on the challenge of climate change. Kate directs the Climate and Energy program at the Duke University Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a Senior Lecturer at Duke Law, where she teaches Climate Change and the Law. A proud product of the American public school system, Kate earned her B.A. in political science from Tufts University, and a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Her mother was born in Queens, New York, to second generation Americans from Ireland; her father was born in a small coal-mining community in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Long road trips to National Parks and dinner table discussions of justice shaped Kate’s passion for environmental protection and politics.
Her Tufts experience deepened these interests, through biology and political science coursework, two tours of duty with Sherman Teichman’s immersive Education for Personal Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program, study in France, and bilingual research with a botanist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Kate capped her senior year at Tufts with an invitation to the U.N. Development Program’s conference in Stockholm, where she presented her EPIIC paper on the ties between political marginalization and environmental degradation in the African Sahel.
Kate began her career as a community organizer at small environmental organizations in Washington, DC and San Francisco, California. Working alongside people of color and undocumented immigrants, Kate witnessed firsthand the inextricable linkages between poverty, racism, and pollution. In law school, Kate worked for three years under Karen Musalo, a groundbreaking asylum and refugee lawyer; spent a summer on Saipan helping the Attorney General of the Northern Mariana Islands make a case to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up World War II era PCB contamination; and studied climate, human rights, and immigration law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Following law school, Kate was admitted into the prestigious Honors Program at the United States Department of Justice, to serve as a litigator in the Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD). For seven years Kate brought cases against electric utilities, aluminum smelters, cement plants and landfills for Clean Air Act violations. Her work earned her an EPA Gold Medal for Exceptional Service on a case, as well as two EPA Bronze Medals.
Kate then moved to Capitol Hill where she served as Chief Environmental Counsel to U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and managed his Oversight Subcommittee on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. There, she worked extensively on climate change legislation and Deepwater Horizon oil spill response efforts, and represented the Senator at the 2009 U.N climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2012, Kate moved to Harvard Law School, where she founded and directed the Environmental Policy Initiative (now the Harvard Energy and Environmental Law Program). There, Kate’s work led to greater transparency of hydraulic fracturing chemicals in the U.S. oil and gas industry, informed the EPA as it designed the Clean Power Plan to control carbon pollution from the power sector, and offered constitutional guideposts to states pushing for more aggressive clean energy policies. Kate also taught Oil and Gas Law at Harvard Law School for four years.
Kate now focuses on climate policy as it relates to the electricity sector and the oil and gas sector. Kate was the lead author on a climate policy study for Governor Cooper of North Carolina, and represented eight former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioners on an amicus brief in D.C. Circuit Court litigation over the Trump administration’s rollback of the Clean Power Plant. Kate also runs an inter-disciplinary, multi-university research effort into decision-making in U.S. electricity markets and implications for decarbonization and innovation. Kate spent three months at the International Energy Agency in Paris to study methane abatement policies in 2019-2020, and coauthored the IEA’s regulatory roadmap on the topic. In addition to her course on Climate Change and the Law, Kate taught a course on the Future of the Grid with Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, former FERC Chair Norman Bay, and Dr. Brian Murray of Duke University. Kate regularly consults with congressional offices and state and federal agencies on climate and energy policy, and is invited to speak to governmental, industry, and environmental audiences on these topics.