Ted Halstead, social entrepreneur who created D.C. policy institutes, dies at 52
Ted Halstead, an author and social entrepreneur who helped create Washington-based policy institutes that groomed a generation of public intellectuals and sought to redefine the middle of American politics to solve some of the country’s most pressing challenges, died Sept. 2 in Spain. He was 52.
The cause was the impact of a fall while hiking alone in the mountains near Es Capdellà, in Mallorca, according to his wife, Véronique Bardach. He was a resident of Boynton Beach, Fla.
With his chiseled features, gray-blue eyes and well-coiffed hair, Mr. Halstead established himself quickly as a social presence in Washington starting in the late 1990s. He arrived after having started an environmental think tank in San Francisco at 25 and propelled himself into the mediasphere with editorials, books and TV appearances.
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The author and business executive Arianna Huffington as well as the foreign affairs scholar Walter Russell Mead were among those who used their influence to help advance his ideas and connect him with influential policymakers.
Mr. Halstead, who co-founded the nonpartisan New America Foundation (now New America) in 1999 and later the Climate Leadership Council, possessed a keen fundraising ability and unshakable belief that with enough persistence he could forge broad political alliances. Working on issues including health care, income inequality and climate change, he focused on forging “The Radical Center,” as he put it in the title of one of his books.
Sherle Schwenninger, who helped start the New America Foundation with Mr. Halstead, Mead and Michael Lind (co-author in 2001 of “The Radical Center”), described this vision not as one “that split the difference between left and right” but as “a radical center that offered solutions to the big problems.”
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In the crowded Washington ideas industry, New America carved out space for young writers with new ideas. “The old think-tank models don’t make sense anymore,” Mr. Halstead told The Washington Post in 2001. “There’s a new generation of aspiring public intellectuals who don’t have easy entry into the world of ideas.”
In starting New America, he received seed money from Bill Moyers, the longtime public affairs mandarin, and early contributions from then-Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and the MacArthur Foundation.
The group’s work contributed to the policy architecture of the Affordable Care Act and pioneered ideas such as “baby bonds,” a proposal to narrow the wealth gap by giving every American at birth a modest federal grant. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) campaigned in part on that idea as he ran for president this year.
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New America’s fellows went on to hold prominent positions in the nation’s policy and media establishment. Among them are Karen Kornbluh, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development during the Obama administration; Laurie Rubiner, the executive vice president at Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and a former chief of staff for Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.); and the journalists Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker and Jonathan Chait of New York magazine.
When Mr. Halstead stepped down as president in 2007, he was succeeded by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Post managing editor Steve Coll (now the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism).
A decade later, Mr. Halstead helped create the Climate Leadership Council as a way to bring together policy shapers, environmentalists and fossil-fuel polluters to find common ground and resolve the impasse over cleaning up the climate. He said he thought the political will had stalled over partisan agendas on Capitol Hill, not because of a lack of desire to solve the problem.
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As chairman and chief executive of the Climate Leadership Council until his death, Mr. Halstead had been a relentless promoter of a carbon tax and dividend plan that would require people to pay for the carbon dioxide spewed into the air but would return those payments to taxpayers in the form of dividends. The dividends would be equal to the tax revenue, and federal officials would ease some environmental regulations as part of the deal.
He enlisted a bipartisan group of prominent policymakers to explain that industries’ ability to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without cost was a market failure that should be corrected. The group included former Treasury secretaries James A. Baker III and Lawrence H. Summers, former secretary of state George P. Shultz, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers N. Gregory Mankiw, and former Federal Reserve chair Janet L. Yellen.
Share this articleShareTop executives of ConocoPhillips, BP, the utility giant Exelon, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Procter & Gamble’s largest division endorsed the idea.
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Mr. Halstead recognized that Republican opposition to any tax was an obstacle to his climate plan. But in an interview in February, he said that gaining the support of major corporations was “a Republican jailbreak moment” that would “lead to ever more Republicans coming on board.”
Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said in an interview that the plan was a serious blueprint “that looked like the future of Democratic proposals” when it was unveiled this year. But the Democratic Party has shifted to the left with its Green New Deal, he said, and the party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has adjusted accordingly.
Edward Allen Halstead was born in Chicago on July 25, 1968, and grew up in Brussels, where his father worked as a food industry consultant. A member of Dartmouth College’s Class of 1990, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and then worked with the Green Corps, a community-service program.
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He once told The Post that the experience convinced him that the environmental movement was far behind the times, so he started his own public policy group, the San Francisco-based Redefining Progress, with a $15,000 grant from the Echoing Green foundation. He also received a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 1998.
In addition to his wife of 14 years, survivors include their daughter, Naya Bardach Halstead; his mother, Kate Halstead, of Waltham, Mass.; his father and stepmother, Roy and Gabriele Halstead, of Kraainem, Belgium; and a sister.
After marrying, Mr. Halstead and his wife bought a catamaran and spent four years — from the spring of 2008 to the fall of 2012 — working remotely from sea with their dog, Ria. In a 2011 Cruising World article, he recounted how they fumbled their way through at first.
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“In our haste to prepare for our trip, we found little time to improve our distinctly subpar sailing skills,” he wrote. “In our first weeks on board, Véronique provided near constant entertainment with such repeated inquiries as ‘What’s the boom?’ and ‘What do you call the left and right sides again?’”
They eventually sold the boat to a couple they met in Bali who were convinced they should start out their marriage the same way.
As they awaited the birth of their daughter, Bardach recalled, her husband regularly meditated on the peak of Mallorca’s Moleta des Coll as they discussed the implications of bringing a child into a troubled world. He would take his usual snacks — corn chips, French brie, an avocado and water — and one day on returning from a hike, he said that he would focus on climate change.
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Mr. Halstead then went out and proselytized in his usual upbeat, self-assured way. During a 2017 TED Talk titled “A climate solution where all sides can win,” he flashed a photo of dark-eyed, curly-haired Naya as he recounted how his toddler was “under the mistaken impression that this conference is named in honor of her father.”
As the laughter died down, he offered, “Who am I to contradict my baby girl?”
Steven Mufson contributed to this report.
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