BIO: Rod Richardson

Rod Richardson President of the Grace Richardson Fund and co-founder of the Climate and Freedom International Coaliton
Rod Richardson, President of Grace Richardson Fund - a private foundation that pioneers new free market solutions for critical issues in gridlock.

Rod Richardson serves as President of the Grace Richardson Fund (GRF), and co-founder/co-chair of the Climate & Freedom International Coalition Meeting, co-facilitated in collaboration with Tholos Foundation. GRF pioneers new free market solutions to emerging 21st C. challenges. Notably, over the last decade, GRF has emerged as the leading private foundation pioneering free market climate policy, a set of new proposals rooted in the observation that the key solution for climate change, poverty and the evils that follow, is one and the same thing: more freedom. All the tools in the free market toolbox — free trade, competition, property rights, supply side tax policy, democracy, and rule of law, etc. — can be combined in novel ways to powerfully accelerate not only the innovation and deployment of ever cleaner solutions, but the expansion of freedom itself — and with that, the eradication of global poverty. As a hybrid private foundation / think tank, GRF follows a strategy of collaborative policy innovation. It convenes scores of fellow think tanks and hundreds of scholars and experts, to brainstorm and develop new freedom-expanding solutions to the pressing problems of our time.

In Green Market Revolution, a new work published in June 2020 by the Austrian Economics Center and the British Conservation Alliance, Rod elaborates on the concepts of Clean Tax Cuts and Clean Free Market Policy, which can be especially useful during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

Rod Richardson in front of the EarthX 2019 podcast interview stage
Rod Richardson in front of the EarthX 2019 podcast interview stage

As a columnist for The American Spectator, Rod makes the case that clean capitalism and basic economic freedoms go hand-in-hand, and can best be expanded, together, side by side. These new concepts and proposals have been developed collaboratively by transpartisan expert-level “charrette” working groups and teams, convening, more than 300 scholars and experts to advance these policy design discussions.

Since 2016, such policy design discussions have been co-convened by a variety of groups, including: Living Room Conversations; The Jack Kemp Foundation; Rocky Mountain Institute; The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University; R Street Institute, American Sustainable Business Council, The Nature Conservancy, EarthX, American Renewable Energy Institute, ASU LightWorks, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy; Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions Forum; American Council for Capital Formation; Atlas Network, Center for Latin America; and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (MIT CEEPR), LIBERA Bolivia, Institute for Free Trade, Instituto Juan de Mariana, and more.