Stephen Kretzmann has campaigned for social and environmental justice since first getting involved in anti-apartheid solidarity work as a student. For the last thirty years, he has investigated and exposed environmental and human rights crimes associated with and directly caused by the global fossil fuel industry. In the early 1990’s, while at Greenpeace, he led the domestic energy & climate team and campaigned to stop offshore drilling. In 1995 he was honored to be selected as Environmental Advisor to the late Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People in Nigeria.
In the late ‘90s and early ‘00’s, Stephen’s work focused on assisting communities around the world to resist oil & gas development and exposing multinational support for oil and gas companies. He was a co-founder of the late Project Underground, and subsequently worked for several organizations including The International Campaign for Tibet, Amazon Watch, the Ruckus Society, and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Stephen founded Oil Change in 2005 to use data, advocacy and organizing to identify and overcome political and economic barriers to the clean energy transition and the phaseout of the fossil fuel industry. Over fifteen years at Oil Change, Stephen built an organization with hundreds of thousands of supporters and a global team of analysts and campaigners. Today OCI is one of the key organizations in the global energy and climate movement. OCI analysis is widely quoted and used not only in the press and movement circles, but also in boardrooms, legislative chambers, policy shops, academia, and courtrooms.
Throughout his career Stephen has worked with frontline communities, civil society, public and private financial institutions, corporations, and international organizations to remove the social license of the fossil fuel industry, to raise the bar for climate leadership, and to shift the politics of the possible towards justice. Stephen has authored numerous articles and reports, testified before Congress and been arrested dozens of times bearing witness to corporate malfeasance, climate crimes, corruption and the true price of oil. Follow him on Twitter: @Kretzmann. Learn more about Oil Change at priceofoil.org
