Journalist Joins Environmental Defense Fund as a Senior Strategist

New role: Eric Pooley, 51, comes to the Environmental Defense Fund as a senior vice president for strategy and communications after serving as deputy editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Background: He has spent a 28-year career in political, business, and environmental reporting and opinion writing, and is the author of 2010’s The Climate War, which extensively featured advocates from the Environmental Defense Fund.

Why he was hired: Mr. Pooley’s skills as a journalist and communicator are needed at this moment in the organization’s mission to reduce global warming through federal policy and market-based solutions, says Fred Krupp, the organization’s president. After failing to persuade Congress to pass the last climate bill in 2009, the group is “rethinking our approach and searching for fresh ways to connect with people from across the political spectrum,” Mr. Krupp says.

His agenda: To “drain the bile” and partisanship from the issue of climate change, says Mr. Pooley. Specifically, he says, the Environmental Defense Fund and its allies hope to demonstrate, through local and regional projects, that the country can shift to clean energy while also creating jobs.

Why he took the job: The Great Recession and other pressing issues have momentarily shut down the debate at a national level, Mr. Pooley says, but now is the time to prepare long-term strategies to present at the next opportune moment. “If we don’t get a handle on [climate change], at a certain point it will be taken out of our hands” by natural and potentially catastrophic processes, he says.

Education: Mr. Pooley holds a bachelor’s degree in German language and literature from Brown University.

Salary: He declined to reveal it. The organization’s budget was $101-million in 2010.

Book he recommends to climate-change skeptics: The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer R. Weart.