Ted Halstead

Ted Halstead (July 25, 1968 – September 2, 2020) was an American author, policy entrepreneur, and public speaker who founded four non-profit think tanks and advocacy organizations: the Climate Leadership Council, Americans for Carbon Dividends, New America, and Redefining Progress.

His areas of expertise included climate policy, economic policy, environmental policy, healthcare, and political reform.

Halstead published numerous articles and two books, including The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (co-authored with Michael Lind).

His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Fortune, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, National Review, and the Harvard Business Review, among other publications.

He was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

Halstead earned his bachelor's degree in 1990 from Dartmouth College, where he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in philosophy.

In 1993, at age 25, Halstead founded Redefining Progress, an environmental economics think tank based in San Francisco, with a $15,000 seed grant from Echoing Green.

Halstead served as Executive Director from 1993 to 1997.

In 1995, Redefining Progress released the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an alternative to the GDP that takes social and environmental costs into account.

The GPI was launched in an October 1995 cover story in The Atlantic entitled "If The Economy Is Up, Why Is America Down?"

that Halstead co-authored with colleagues Clifford Cobb and Jonathan Rowe.

In 1997, Redefining Progress organized the Economists' Statement on Climate Change to promote market-based solutions to climate change.

Over 2,600 economists and 19 Nobel Prize winners signed the statement.

Halstead stepped down as Executive Director of Redefining Progress in 1997, moving into a position on the board.

He received his MPA in 1998 from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Montgomery Fellow.

Halstead was the founder, chairman, and CEO of the Climate Leadership Council, which promotes carbon dividends as a cost-effective, politically viable, and equitable way to reduce carbon pollution.

Halstead founded New America (formerly known as New America Foundation) in 1999, at the age of 30, and served as founding President and CEO until 2007.

Under his leadership, the organization grew rapidly to a staff of 100 and an annual budget of $10 million.

New America's original mission was to bring new voices and new ideas into the public debate, and to break out of the traditional liberal and conservative categories.

James Fallows was the original chairman of New America's board of directors.

On December 10, 2001, The Washington Post published a Styles section profile on Halstead entitled "Big Thinker: Ted Halstead's New America Foundation Has It All: Money, Brains and Buzz".

Redefining Progress and Halstead also promoted the idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which the government of British Columbia was the first to implement in 2008.

Redefining Progress closed its doors in 2008.

Eric Schmidt, former Executive Chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc, served as chairman of New America's Board from 2008 to 2016.

Shortly after founding New America, Halstead and Michael Lind co-authored "The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics," which Senator John McCain described as “A political manifesto worthy of the Information Age.” As a result, New America became known in its early years as a "Radical Centrist" think tank.

A profile in Bloomberg suggested the release of this report "may be the biggest day for climate policy since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015."

Since then, the Climate Leadership Council has recruited a number of "Founding Members" which include:

The Climate Leadership Council's Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividends Plan is based on four pillars: (1) a gradually rising carbon fee, (2) carbon dividends for all Americans, (3) regulatory simplification, and (4) border carbon adjustment.

The Climate Leadership Council was soft-launched on May 19, 2016, with the publication of Halstead's white paper, "Unlocking the Climate Puzzle".

This report summarizes the economic, geopolitical, and psychological reasons that climate progress is deadlocked, and suggests that a carbon dividends plan could overcome each of these barriers.

The Climate Leadership Council was officially launched on February 8, 2017, with the publication of "The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends", co-authored by James A. Baker III, Martin Feldstein, Halstead, Gregory Mankiw, Henry M. Paulson Jr., George P. Shultz, Thomas Stephenson, and Rob Walton.

This report argues that a new climate strategy based on carbon dividends can strengthen America's economy, reduce regulation, help working-class Americans, shrink government, and promote national security.

Americans for Carbon Dividends was publicly launched in June 2018 with the publication of a New York Times op-ed by Lott and Breaux, entitled “How to Break the Climate Impasse.”

Americans for Carbon Dividends is funded by leading auto manufacturers, tech companies, energy companies, and trade associations from across the economy, including those in oil and gas, solar, wind, nuclear and geothermal.

Americans for Carbon Dividends represents the first time that leading oil and gas companies have put their money behind a meaningful national price on carbon, and the first time that such a broad coalition of U.S. energy interests have co-funded an advocacy campaign to promote a price on carbon.

In 2019, the Climate Leadership Council helped organize a large public statement:  The Economists Statement on Carbon Dividends, first published in The Wall Street Journal and signed by over 3,500 U.S. economists, including all four living former Chairs of the Federal Reserve (Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volcker), 27 Nobel Laureate economists, and 15 former chairs of the President's Council of Economic Advisors.

Halstead was founding CEO of Americans For Carbon Dividends, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization that promoted a national carbon dividends.

The national co-chairs of Americans for Carbon Dividends are former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott and former Democratic Senator John Breaux.

As of January 2020, corporate funders of Americans for Carbon Dividends include: AWEA, BP, Calpine, ConocoPhillips, EDF Renewables, Exelon, ExxonMobil, First Solar, Ford, GM, IBM, Shell and Vistra Energy.

Leaders of Americans for Carbon Dividends include former Republican member of Congress Ryan Costello as Managing Director, Steve Rice as Managing Director and Greg Bertelsen as Executive Vice President.