Greg Bertelsen
Greg Bertelsen has served as CEO of the Climate Leadership Council since 2020. He joined the Council in 2017, serving as executive vice president, leading the organization’s government relations and engagement with the business community.
Mr. Bertelsen has been a repeat guest on NPR and contributed opinion pieces to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other national publications. He is a frequent speaker at national and international energy and climate conferences, promoting emission reduction policies that leverage the power of market forces.
Mr. Bertelsen previously served as senior director, energy and resources policy, at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), where he led advocacy efforts on behalf of manufacturers for a variety of energy and environmental policy issues. He also served as regulatory analyst, environmental markets & policy, at Siemens AG, where he advised Fortune 100 industrial and utility companies on energy and environmental policy. In 2016 and 2017, he served as an official advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on environmental justice issues.
Mr. Bertelsen is a lawyer by training who received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Dickinson College and a JD from the American University Washington College of Law. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Thomas L. Craven.
705: Greg Bertelsen: A bipartisan climate roadmap including a carbon tax
Recent guest Bob Litterman spoke highly of Greg and his work at the Climate Leadership Council, a rare bipartisan effort on climate. He put us in touch. In the meantime, I was curious about a climate group started by Secretaries of State James A. Baker and George P. Shultz along with Ted Halstead. But they and other prominent Republicans published The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.
Greg is CLC’s CEO, leading that project on the ground working with politicians. If you’re curious how it can work, he explains it in our conversation.
You’ll hear my long-standing concern that people and organizations who focus on climate and greenhouse gases end up increasing other problems. He sees in some areas that if you solve part of the problem you increase it in other areas, like squeezing a balloon, as he puts it, or whack-a-mole, as I do, but doesn’t speak about that problem in focusing only on carbon.
I also didn’t get to ask him about the fourth pillar of the case: “significant regulatory simplification.” Could it open the door for more pollution and a net lowering of Earth’s ability to sustain life?
Still, listen and hear directly from him on the bipartisan effort he’s leading.