Paul Bledsoe is a Strategic Adviser for PPI. Paul Bledsoe is President of Bledsoe & Associates, LLC, a strategic public policy firm specializing in tax policy, energy, natural resources and climate change, among other issues. Paul is also senior strategist for the American Energy Innovation Council, a group of 10 CEOs including Bill Gates. Paul served as Director of Communications of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton from 1998-2000, and from 1995 to 1998 was Special Assistant to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. He was Communications Director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance under the chairmanship of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from 1993 to 1995.
Paul was senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a leading centrist think tank, co-founded by former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, Howard Baker and George Mitchell, from 2007-2012. From 2002 to 2010, he was Director of Strategy for the National Commission on Energy Policy.
Paul was Senior Policy Advisor on the staff of the Presidential National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Off-Shore Drilling, and was Senior Fellow on Energy and Climate at the German Marshall Fund from 2013-2015. He was an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment from 2003-2005. In 2016, he was one of two main speakers at an Oxford Union formal debate in favor of a strong, necessary role for developing countries in climate protection, a position which carried the day by nearly a two to one margin.
Paul has been a leading figure in shaping two of the world’s major climate change agreements. After the disappointing outcomes in the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, Paul began writing about and advocating a bottom-up, nationally determined, non-legally binding, ‘pledge and review’ approach to the UN climate agreement process, which led to the successful Paris Agreement in 2015.
Paul has also been a major voice for nearly a decade regarding the centrality of a phase out of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) through the Montreal Protocol, which led to the ground-breaking Kigali Amendment in 2016.
Paul has written for or been featured in leading print outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Science Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, National Journal, Prospect Magazine, Nature, Science, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call, and the Financial Times and on many television and radio programs, including the CNN, BBC World Service Television and Radio, CBS, MSNBC, PBS, FOX, SKY and NPR. Paul received a B.A. with honors and a M.A. in English from Ohio State University.
