Kevin Poloncarz is a partner with Covington & Burling LLP and co-chairs the firm’s Environmental and Energy Practice Group, Energy Industry Group and ESG Practice.

Kevin is ranked among the nation’s top five climate change lawyers and California’s top eight environmental lawyers by Chambers USA; among the top global climate change lawyers by Chambers Global Market Leaders; and among the top four US-based climate change lawyers by Who’s Who Global Elite.

On behalf of a coalition of major power companies, he argued the key statutory point upon which the D.C. Circuit struck down the Trump Administration’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan, and then second-chaired his Supreme Court partner’s argument alongside the Solicitor General in the landmark climate case of West Virginia v. EPA.  He has since been representing some of those same companies in defending the Biden Administration’s carbon pollution standards for power plants in the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court.

Kevin also convenes CEG, a group of electric utilities and power producers seeking to advance decarbonization strategies for the power sector, and has represented electric-sector interests in litigation challenging the Trump Administration’s weakening of greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty vehicles, annulling California’s waiver to enforce its own more stringent standards, and defending the Biden Administration’s reinstatement of strong tailpipe standards.

Kevin is on the advisory boards of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University (NYU) School of Law, and the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law; the board of directors of the Center for Applied Environmental Law and Policy; and a fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers.

He is a graduate of Hobart College and the University of Chicago Law School. He, his husband and their rescue Irish Wolfhound live on three acres in the Napa Valley, where he tends to a small orchard, large garden, flock of hens and two rescue goats.