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Protecting the climate has been Doug Grandt's full-time job for three years. He figures his green encore career might span another 10 or 15 years, as he hones in on where he can have the most impact. At 62, he's just getting started fighting climate change.

He wants to combine his engineering background and his new skills in leadership and public speaking to help take clean energy solutions to scale. "Solar on every rooftop," is his goal.

Are you in a green encore career? Tell us about it! Grandt says economics and environmental urgency make this the right time to use solar electricity and solar water heating systems to make whole neighborhoods and cities carbon-neutral. "If some other guy is going out to sell solar and make a living, why not me?" he told me over lunch the other day.

I met Doug right after he had come from a meeting at U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer's office, where he had led a delegation of "climate precinct captains" organized by 1Sky.org, a national advocacy campaign pressing Congress for strong climate-change legislation. As the coordinator of 1Sky's precinct captains in northern California, he was about to fly east to help the organization map its future strategy.

His advocacy and organizing work are only one part of Doug's green encore portfolio of activities. An industrial and petroleum engineer, Grandt had had an eclectic career modeling oil deposits in Prudhoe Bay, buying containers for an ocean cargo carrier and running the data processing operations of a direct-mail firm. Five years ago, after the dot-com crash, he found himself 57 and unemployed.

He had been a casual anti-war activist back in college, but not politically active since. "I was a soccer dad, Boy Scout leader, raising three kids" now grown, he says. Late one night, he was listening to NPR and heard former Vice President Al Gore give his now-famous Inconvenient Truth talk on the radio. "I want to do something full time on climate change," he decided.

He attended citizen training to be able to give Gore's slide show himself and has presented it, with his own modifications, to dozens of school classrooms and community groups. At a climate-change forum, he met Nancy Skinner, now a member of the California Assembly, then the founder and head of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, which helps local governments take leadership on the environment. She had launched the Cities for Climate Protection Program, which today involves more than 500 cities and counties.

Skinner pointed Doug to people in the network of state agencies that were gearing up to implement the state's pioneering climate change policies. In particular, AB 32, the "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006," was creating a demand for talented people to implement the legislation at the state's Air Resources Board (ARB). Doug applied for more than 30 positions at the ARB, got four interviews and got one offer. "I just wanted to get my foot in the door," he says.

His first position was implementing a regulation mandating retrofits of city bus engines, to reduce diesel particulates and NOx (nitrogen oxide) emissions. "I called every transit agency in the state," he says. After 18 months, he moved to another department and did much the same thing for commercial harbor craft. "So then I called every fisherman, excursion, ferry and tugboat operator in the state."

Meanwhile, a working group at the ARB was scoping out the implementation of AB 32. Doug put his hand up to tackle "residential combustion" and spent eight months drafting measures to reduce the carbon waste from home gas water heaters and furnaces.

Now Doug is taken with the innovative financing mechanisms that are making it possible to market energy efficiency and clean energy as money-saving investments, not environment-friendly sacrifices. For example, San Francisco has recently joined Berkeley, Palm Desert, Sonoma County and a handful of cities around the country to start making 20-year loans to homeowners for solar energy and energy-conservation measures. A larger pilot project, involving more than 50 California cities, is set for later this year. Many solar companies are also offering no-money-down loans or guaranteeing monthly savings on residential energy bills.

"I really think the solution is to get rooftop installations: solar panels and solar water heaters," he says. Giving the Inconvenient Truth slide show and his work with 1Sky has made him realize he has a knack for public speaking and community organizing. After he "retires" from the Air Resources Board, he says he will figure out a way to make a living while directly reducing carbon output, working full-time on climate change.

More information on 1Sky.org's President's Day Week of Action