Courtesy of Anika Shethia

Over the weekend, a group of Yale students traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby for climate legislation. 

For this advocacy trip, Yale Students for Carbon Dividends, a student-led organization, lobbied in support of the PROVE IT Act and the Foreign Pollution Fee Act of 2023 — two pieces of legislation that center carbon border adjustment mechanisms and emissions data transparency. The group met with offices of senators and representatives across the political spectrum to push for these bills.

The PROVE IT Act would allow for data collection of CO₂ emissions of foreign countries in comparison to the U.S., and the Foreign Pollution Fee Act would install a carbon border adjustment mechanism to encourage other countries to decarbonize. 

“We’re a bipartisan club, and so we were trying to split the difference between more liberal ideals of clean energy and green policy with this more Republican view of protecting American manufacturing,” said club member Katie Meine ’27. “I think it definitely showed that you don’t have to separate the two—you can have something that makes economic sense that also helps the environment.”

The group met with offices of several key figures in climate policy, including the offices of Senators Bernie Sanders, Lindsey Graham, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, as well as several members from the house of representatives. The group used the meetings to discuss the bills’ economic impacts and potential bipartisan appeal with staffers. 

Anika Shethia ’27 explained that “you could definitely feel” the impact of the Trump administration in these meetings. 

“It’s definitely tense in D.C., especially given everything that’s happening with budget cuts,” said Shethia. “A lot of the key departments, including [the Environmental Protection Agency] and the Department of Energy, are dealing with hiring freezes and firings. So it’s a lot more difficult to strategize around imminent climate concerns — even though the legislation we were advocating for was sensible economically.”

Meine added that in a meeting at the office of Republican Senator Thom Tillis, staffers implied that their policies on climate would “go along with the Trump’s administration’s.”

Despite challenges in the current political climate, students said they felt hopeful about the future of the two bills. 

Meine explained that while the staff members for Republican lawmakers she met with seemed reluctant in their wholehearted support of the bills, Democrats were “very receptive” and “excited.”

“Many staffers we met with were optimistic about the [bills] as a stepping stone to progress climate policy,” said Yana Eber ’27. “As the Trump presidency leans toward climate denialism, the amount of legislation on climate has severely diminished, but [these bills] felt like something we could still move forward with.”

On the first day in office of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

In 2022, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 6,343 million metric tons (14.0 trillion pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalents.