Biography
Gavin McCormick is a pioneering figure in climate technology, recognized for his ability to bridge technical communities and create breakthrough innovations.
His unconventional approach stems from an unusual childhood: born in South Africa to American diplomat parents and raised across Thailand and New Zealand, he learned early that “very often problems come from two communities or worldviews misunderstanding or ignoring each other, and the best solutions often come from getting two different communities or worldviews to listen to each other and collaborate.”
Throughout his career, Gavin has introduced breakthrough innovations by connecting technical fields that historically didn’t talk to each other—from economic causal inference and power grid management to AI and satellite monitoring. His approach is practical: he spots where different expert communities are talking past each other and helps them find common ground.
As cofounder and Executive Director of WattTime since 2013, Gavin developed the world’s first system to dynamically reduce emissions by optimizing electric load in real time. This technology now powers over one billion electric vehicles, smart thermostats, and batteries for companies including Toyota, BMW, Google Nest, and Amazon.
In 2020, Gavin co-founded Climate TRACE, assembling a global coalition of over 150 collaborating universities, nonprofits, and tech companies to apply AI to satellite imagery for monitoring global greenhouse gas emissions. This work has earned recognition as Fast Company’s #5 most innovative company in the world and one of Time’s 100 most important inventions of 2020.
Gavin’s academic foundation includes advanced studies in Energy & Behavioral Economics at UC Berkeley, where he pioneered research on how power plants actually respond to changes in electricity demand.
Earlier in his career, he spent time at the US Department of Energy providing the impact analysis for different proposed energy efficiency standards and incorporating competing feedback from rival stakeholders with wildly different worldviews. This was an experience that reinforced his belief in the power of clear communication across different backgrounds.
“Slashing emissions is actually much easier than most people realize,” Gavin observes. “It only seems so hard because we spend so much of our time fighting over whose fault they are instead.”
Breakthrough program
Gavin McCormick was selected for the Climate Breakthrough Award program in 2025.
Gavin wants to launch a groundbreaking initiative to revolutionize the process carbon accounting rules use to evaluate impact, ensuring that governments and private sector actors make decisions that decrease emissions in reality, not just on paper.
Through his work with WattTime and Climate TRACE, he has witnessed how companies invest in emissions-reducing changes primarily to align with accounting rules and claim progress toward carbon neutrality. These rules hold tremendous power to define corporate and state climate action agendas, but their ability to drive real-world emissions reductions is not guaranteed.
The challenge is urgent: new “green” industries like green hydrogen, direct air capture, and energy storage have sufficient industry consensus to secure investment, but could actually increase pollution by gigatons without proper oversight. Working groups that set the rules for how companies measure and report their climate impact often lack access to any real-world data to make sure these new industries reduce pollution in reality.
Gavin’s new initiative will focus on the handful of working groups that define rules for new industries. Once these rules are established, they become extremely difficult to change because companies make billions of dollars in investments based on the standards. His approach is to engage the most impactful groups that are also most open to change, then rally independent experts to produce consensus studies identifying which rulemaking options will actually reduce the most pollution.
Gavin is uniquely positioned to tackle this challenge given his technical expertise, proven ability to gather diverse stakeholders, and his exceptional talent for helping different technical communities understand each other.
The potential impact can be staggering. According to analysis, this project could reach 2.9 gigatons of annual pollution reduction—or a cumulative 21.5 GT—by 2036 through enabling the adoption of effective climate solutions on a systemic level. If successful, this strategy could also inspire consensus-building, science-focused standards setting across other industries and sectors.
