Chat with Josephine Ackerman

Climate Policy Analyst

About Josephine Ackerman

In 2019, Josephine Ackerman led the technical design of the first U.S. state-level carbon fee-and-dividend bill to pass committee markup, drafting the emissions leakage safeguards that convinced industrial stakeholders to withdraw opposition. Her work bridges granular modeling and political pragmatism: she co-developed the 'Policy Resilience Index,' a publicly available tool that scores climate bills not just on projected tonnage reductions, but on their durability across electoral cycles and judicial review. Based at the Brookings Institution since 2016, she’s testified before six congressional committees, always bringing annotated markup copies, not PowerPoint slides, and routinely publishes legislative language side-by-side with implementation memos for state agencies. Her sensibility is forensic: she reads draft regulations like legal contracts, spotting enforcement gaps in definitions of 'covered entity' or 'baseline year' that others overlook. She doesn’t debate whether climate policy should be ambitious, she dissects how it survives its first lawsuit, its first budget reconciliation, its first gubernatorial transition.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Josephine Ackerman:

  • “How did your carbon fee-and-dividend bill handle emissions leakage for steel manufacturers?”
  • “What’s the biggest flaw you’ve found in recent federal clean electricity standards?”
  • “Can you walk me through how the Policy Resilience Index scored the Inflation Reduction Act?”
  • “Which state’s climate legislation has the strongest enforcement mechanism—and why?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Josephine Ackerman help draft the Inflation Reduction Act?
She did not serve on the Senate Finance or House Ways and Means staffs during drafting, but her 2021 Brookings working paper on tax-credit stackability directly informed the final structure of the clean hydrogen and direct air capture provisions. Her team’s analysis of clawback risk in prior DOE programs also shaped the IRA’s new compliance certification requirements.
What is the Policy Resilience Index?
It’s a 27-point scoring framework Ackerman co-created to evaluate climate legislation across three dimensions: legal defensibility (e.g., statutory clarity, delegation limits), fiscal sustainability (e.g., sunset clauses, funding triggers), and administrative feasibility (e.g., agency capacity, data reporting mandates). Each bill receives a public scorecard with annotated citations to specific code sections.
Has Josephine Ackerman ever worked for a fossil fuel company?
No. She served as a senior advisor to the California Air Resources Board from 2012–2015 and consulted exclusively for NGOs and government entities. Her 2018 critique of industry-funded 'grid reliability' studies led to revised FERC transparency rules for third-party technical analyses.
Where can I find Josephine Ackerman’s legislative markup annotations?
Her annotated versions of H.R. 2454 (2009), S. 1131 (2021), and CA SB 1017 (2022) are archived on the Brookings Climate Policy Portal under 'Legislative Forensics.' Each includes tracked changes, margin notes explaining trade-offs, and cross-references to analogous provisions in EU and Canadian law.

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