Michael Curley

Michael Curley is a lawyer who has spent the majority of his career in project finance and the last 30 years in energy and environmental finance. He joined the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) as a Visiting Scholar in 2013. Curley published "Paying for Tomorrow," by ELI in July 2018. He does commentary on environmental issues on WYPR, the national public radio station serving Maryland.

Curley is the author of Finance Policy for Renewable Energy and a Sustainable Environment, published by Taylor & Francis in 2014. The Central University for Finance & Economics in China has translated this book into Chinese and asked him to write a special Preface for them.

Curley also wrote "The Handbook of Project Finance for Water and Wastewater Systems," published by Times/Mirror and "Fundamentals of Water Finance," which was published by Taylor & Francis in October 2016. He contributed to the Huffington Post for four years and is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Club. He has also published over 50 articles.

Curley has worked in 40 countries, primarily as the Senior Financial Advisor to the Office of International Affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in the same capacity for the World Resources Institute. His primary work with EPA was in Russia, Ukraine, the Republic of Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and in Kazakhstan, where he built basic water and sanitation systems in 15 rural villages and set up a system for financing them throughout the country. Curley has had extensive dealings with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In 1990, Curley was appointed to the Environmental Financial Advisory Board at EPA, where he served for 21 years under four Presidents. Over the last 20 years, he has taught environmental & energy finance and law courses at the Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University as well as the Vermont Law School. He founded the Environmental Finance Centers at the University of Maryland, Syracuse University and Cleveland State University. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of “Protect Our Power”, a not-for-profit corporation created to defend the country’s electric power grid from cyber attacks and electromagnetic pulses.

Curley is also an entrepreneur. In the early 1980’s, he raised the venture capital for, founded, and served as president and CEO of the third municipal bond insurance company in the world and the first to insure economic development projects. The company had 28 employees when he sold it to a major international bank. Curley was also a partner in the celebrated New York City law firm of Shea & Gould.

Curley has also served in several roles in government. First, as Deputy Commissioner (Secretary) & General Counsel of the New York State Department of Economic Development; and then as President and CEO of the State’s bank for economic development. He was also the General Counsel of the New York State Science & Technology Foundation, the State’s venture capital agency. Prior to that, Curley served as Parliamentarian of the New York State Assembly and Associate Counsel to the Speaker and was also an Assistant to Congressman Richard D. McCarthy (D-NY) in Washington, DC. He also served as Adjunct Professor of Banking & Finance at New York University teaching Venture Capital and Capital Markets. Curley was appointed to the Board of Directors of the United Nations Development Corporation by New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

As a member of the Board of the International Rural Water Association, Curley built water and basic sanitation systems in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala in addition to his previous work in Kazakhstan. He continued this work for several years privately in Honduras and Guatemala.

When Curley is not doing environmental finance, he is writing fiction. His first novel, a thriller entitled YELLOWSTONE: Final Extinction, was published in January 2016. He published a short story version of YELLOWSTONE, entitled “Final Extinction”, in 2015 in an anthology of works by members of the National Press Club. In 2017, he published a short story entitled “Bridgette’s Guardians”. In November 2108, he published his second novel, The Calypso Virus. And in March 2019, he published a third short story: “Molly McNamara, CyberAdmiral”.

For the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Curley developed national municipal bond banks for water, wastewater, district heating and other municipal infrastructure for both the Russian Federation and Ukraine, designed a revolving fund for safe drinking water for the Ministry of the Environment in the Republic of Georgia and built fifteen rural water systems and developed the national model for rural water finance in the Republic of Kazakhstan.