Peter Teague Announced as 2024 Paradigm Award Winner

The Breakthrough Institute is pleased to announce Peter Teague as the recipient of the 2024 Paradigm Award. Teague will accept the award at the annual Breakthrough Dialogue in Sausalito, California this June.

For over 20 years, Teague has been a singular voice in environmental philanthropy. As the environmental program officer at the Nathan Cummings Foundation for over a decade, Teague helped launch an entire new field of environmental advocacy. He was not only the original funder of the Apollo Alliance, the first major effort to shift climate advocacy from a regulation-focused to a public investment and technology-centered agenda, but largely organized the effort, bringing together the initial partners to launch the campaign.

Teague authored the preface to the Death of Environmentalism and is a coauthor of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. He was the first philanthropist to fund the green jobs movement and the first to connect energy poverty concerns to climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. In the middle of his tenure at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, he changed the name of the program to Environmental Innovation and invested heavily to bring non-profits and think tanks with broad expertise in public technology policy into climate policy discussions, creating, in the process, the innovation side of long-running innovation/deployment debate.

Today, Teague is a philanthropic advisor working at the intersection of climate change, clean energy, and democracy, a field that has been dramatically transformed thanks to his efforts over the last two decades. Throughout his career in environmental philanthropy, Teague has exemplified the field at its best, investing in a diversity of strategies and approaches, incubating transformative new ideas, and building new institutions for the long term.

The Breakthrough Institute bestows the Paradigm Award each year to recognize accomplishment and leadership in the effort to make the future secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling for all the world’s inhabitants on an ecologically vibrant planet. Past recipients of the award are Mark Lynas, Emma Marris, Jesse Ausubel, Ruth DeFries, David MacKay, Calestous Juma, Rachel Laudan, Stewart Brand, Steve Rayner, Joyashree Roy, Charles Kenny, and Pamela Ronald

The theme of this year’s Breakthrough Dialogue is “The Death of Environmentalism.” As we revisit the seminal essay, twenty years later, and consider its impact on the environmental movement and efforts to address climate change, there could be no better recipient of the Paradigm Award than Peter Teague, without whom the essay and all that came after would not have been possible. We are delighted to honor him.