Ari Benkler

Ari Benkler is a PhD student at UC Berkeley in Political Science focused on the political economy of climate change and its intersection with economic inequality and democratic instability. More specifically, he is interested in how different institutional arrangements, constellations of interest groups, and formulations of legal rules can produce variation in the rapidity of emissions reductions, the capital concentration of the emerging green economy, the level of political support for decarbonization policy, and the stability of democratic regimes. Before pursuing graduate studies, he worked as a consultant in the renewable energy sector, performing political risk analyses for renewable energy developers, institutional investors, and local, regional, and national governments around the world to evaluate the attractiveness of large-scale investments in solar power, onshore wind, offshore wind, battery storage, and emissions-intensive industrial process greening. He has a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University.