Exeter, NH (January 23, 2008)—A highlight of this year’s third annual Green Cup Challenge will be “Focus the Nation,” a roundtable meeting hosted by Phillips Exeter Academy with local politicians, scientists and sustainability experts discussing global warming and strategies to fight it. The event will be held in the Academy’s Assembly Hall on Front Street, on Thursday, January 31, at 7 p.m., scheduled as part of the “Focus the Nation” campaign. It is free and open to the public.

Panel participants include State Senator Maggie Hassan; University of New Hampshire Research Scientist, Cameron Wake; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official, John Moskal; Clean Air # Cool Planet executive, Roger Stephenson; and Kurt Ehrenberg, with the New Hampshire Sierra Club. Participants will discuss their organizations’ involvement and activities in fighting global warming. The discussion will serve as an opportunity to raise awareness, generate solutions and solicit ideas from students and the community. Afterwards, the panel will take audience questions.

Organized as a national teach-in on global warming solutions, “Focus the Nation” will offer an opportunity for non-partisan dialogue at more than a thousand universities, public schools, places of worship, civic organizations and businesses, with local, state and federal political leaders and decision-makers.

Senator Margaret Wood Hassan, D-Exeter - Elected to the New Hampshire Senate in 2004, Senator Hassan currently serves as Senate President Pro Tem. She is chair of the Capital Budget Committee and the Public and Municipal Affairs Committee; vice chair of the Energy, Environment and Economic Development Committee; and a member of the Finance Committee. Hassan's legislative priorities include health insurance, education, the environment and disability issues. She is a practicing attorney, having earned her doctorate from Northeastern University School of Law in Massachusetts, and her bachelor’s from Brown University in Rhode Island. Locally, she has served on the Advisory Committee to the Adequacy in Education and Finance Commission, the boards of the Community Developmental Services and the Disabilities Rights Center, and volunteered in the Exeter Public Schools.

Cameron Wake – Research Associate Professor, University of New Hampshire – Wake is an associate professor of the Climate Change Research Center at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests focus on the development of climate records through the recovery and analysis of ice cores. For more than 20 years, Wake has worked with research expeditions to Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, China, Pakistan, the Canadian Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica. Currently, he is leading research programs to develop high-resolution, multi-parameter ice core paleoclimate records from glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Canadian Arctic.

As a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s AIRMAP program, Wake is investigating changes in New England’s climate and air quality, primarily to identify causes of climate variability, predict air quality changes as an addition to daily weather forecasts and demonstrate new forecasting technologies. Ultimately, the study seeks to develop relevant information concerning climate and air quality for the citizens of New England. Wake is also leading the INHALE project, investigating the link between climate, air quality and human health. 

John Moskal – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Moskal is an engineer by training who has spent more than 20 years in the private and public sectors in the energy and environmental fields. He works at the New England regional office of the U.S. EPA, where he specializes in analyzing environmental impacts associated with restructured energy markets, energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.

Roger Stephenson - Executive Vice President, Clean Air-Cool Planet - Stephenson has more than 20 years of experience providing public relations counsel and expertise to corporate management, government agencies and non-profit executives. From 1994-1999, he served as special assistant to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and later managed overall program and policy development for President Clinton’s American Heritage River initiative for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In 2000, he returned to New Hampshire after being a public relations counselor at the behavioral public relations firm, Jackson Jackson & Wagner. He later formed his own firm, Stephenson Strategic Communications. Before serving in the Clinton administrations, Stephenson was national field director for the League of Conservation Voters, and later executive director of the LCV Education Fund, at which time he managed the Florida Global Warming Education Project.

Kurt Ehrenberg – National Field Director, Sierra Club – Ehrenberg joined the Sierra Club in 2003, serving as program and campaign director, making energy and environmental issues a priority on political agendas in New Hampshire. Recently, Ehrenberg worked with the mayors of New Hampshire’s largest cities on the Sierra Club’s “Cool Cities” program; with the Carbon Coalition on the New Hampshire Climate Change Resolution; and “The Clean Energy Future Begins in New Hampshire ’08” campaign during the New Hampshire presidential primary. He currently serves on the Board for The New Hampshire Carbon Challenge and the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League.

For further information, call the Academy’s Sustainability Coordinator Jennifer Wilhelm at (603) 777-3765. A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at (603) 777-4309 and on our website at www.exeter.edu. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call (603) 777-4330.

Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 45 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and 23 foreign countries.