Director’s Fellow Alex Posner’s Leads “Students for Carbon Dividends”

Alex Posner ‘19,  a recent ISPS Director’s Fellow, helped launch Students for Carbon Dividends (S4CD) last year. The founding coalition includes College Republican and College Democrat chapters from across the country, and is the first bipartisan student coalition united around national climate policy.

A requirement of the Director’s Fellows program is for students to secure and complete a policy internship over the summer, whereby ISPS provides them with a stipend. Alex chose to spend the summer of 2017 interning for the Climate Leadership Council in Washington, DC, an organization that advocates for a revenue-neutral carbon tax, specifically the Carbon Dividends plan.

More recently, the Climate Leadership Council in partnership with S4CD recently unveiled the Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends. It is a statement of support from a huge swath of economics community, and is signed by every living former Fed Chair, 15 out of 16 living former Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and 27 Nobel Prize-winning economists. The signatures include over 3,500 economists across the country, making it the largest statement of economists in the history of the profession.

Coverage of the role Yale students played (through S4CD) has been covered in The Yale Daily News, The Financial Times, The Stanford Daily, and The Harvard Crimson.

Other notable signees include Yale Economics Nobelist Robert Shiller, Yale Provost Ben Polak, and many other members of the Yale faculty. The statement was organized and signed by former Chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen (PhD ‘71).

We’re excited about the growing momentum and hope this will help shift the needle on climate policy in the United States–slowly, but surely, ” Alex Posner writes.