CLIPI’s “Radical Environmentalist” who Led Decades of Impact

Ann Carlson spent five years at CLIPI and later, Hall & Phillips. She then joined the UCLA Law School faculty, where she started an environmental law clinic and went on to lead the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

When the Biden administration asked if she'd be interested in serving at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ann said yes. She became General Counsel and then Acting Administrator of an agency responsible for fuel economy standards, a critical lever for addressing climate change.

Ann has described what she carried from her years in public interest law:

"We tend to think of lawyers as filing lawsuits. One of the brilliant things that Carlyle and John did is to think outside the box. So when the False Claims Act didn't quite work in the way that it needed to, John got a Republican senator to amend the False Claims Act to make it work. These guys got fees to shift so that public interest organizations could actually operate. That's not a lawsuit. That's thinking creatively about what's a different way to do business."

Senator Ted Cruz blocked her confirmation, calling her "a radical environmentalist." Ann has said the experience was the most painful part of her professional life.

But she also offered this: "I don't think we're going back on renewable energy or on electric vehicles, despite what the administration wants to do. We're going to go slower. But we're not going backwards."

Ann's career follows a pattern we've seen across CLIPI's alumni: public interest training that leads to decades of impact in academia, government, and policy.