Payne Kilbourn is now an independent consultant and writer after 28 years in the U.S. Navy Submarine Service and eight years in business.

From 2004 to 2012 he was the CEO of Unmanned Ocean Vehicles.  He started the company, attracted capital investment, and was the co-author of the international patent for the company’s unique autonomous, energy-scavenging, year-long endurance unmanned surface vessel for military applications and oceanographic research.  The company demonstrated a fully operational prototype to the US Navy in 2010. The company’s assets were moved to Australia in 2011.

He retired from the Navy as a Captain in 2003. During his career he served on five nuclear attack submarines, the last tour from 1993 to 1995 as Commanding Officer of USS Omaha (SSN 692). While on these submarines he spent more than half his time at sea and made eight 4-6 month deployments to the Atlantic, Mediterranean and the Pacific.

Tours of duty ashore included two years as an instructor at a Navy nuclear power training unit, a two-year tour as an analyst and computer modeler of conventional warfare on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and two tours on the Navy staff in the Pentagon.  He was the 1997 Navy Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and from 1999 – 2001 he was the US Navy representative to the NATO Naval Board in Brussels, Belgium.

He earned a M.A. in Political Science from George Washington University in 1989, a B.S. in Naval Architecture from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1976 and was Certified a Naval Nuclear Engineer in 1980 and Certified for Nuclear Submarine Command in 1994. He was an elected school board member in King George County, Virginia, for three years until 2010.

He is the author of three novels, two screenplays, three non-fiction books on American government (“Gridlock: Why We Are In It,” “Modern Common Sense,” “Unsanity: Unthinking Acceptance of Assertions), non-fiction book “Elements of Climates,” and numerous articles and essays.

Intrigued by the movie An Inconvenient Truth, he applied his education in nuclear physics to deeply research the scientific basis of the theory of global warming and then produced a number of papers and videos that describe the physics and chemistry that underlie it. These prompted the Board to invite him to join the CO2 Coalition.

Selected Publications and Interviews:

Crucial Conversations with our Members:
Navy Veteran, CEO, author, and CO2 Coalition Member talks about his time as an officer on attack submarines, his company "Unmanned Ocean Vehicles", electricity generation, climate models, and the problem with using the term "climate science".