Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?
“We’ve lost the culture war on climate,” Harvard law professor and former Obama administration adviser Jody Freeman told Politico last Wednesday. The article amounts to a dry eulogy for efforts to combat climate change, with Freeman’s refrain that the climate movement failed to go mainstream in the background. What goes unmentioned: Freeman’s extracurricular work as oil industry whisperer.
Freeman served on ConocoPhillips’s board of directors from 2013 to 2023, making over $350,000 a year from the oil and gas giant. She resigned after pushback from Harvard students and activists during the fight against the Willow Project, ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion drilling effort in the Alaskan wilderness. But she has retained her position on the climate advisory board at Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. The fund, whose current value is estimated to be around $1.75 trillion, is commonly known as the Oil Fund because it exists to invest the nation’s substantial petroleum revenue in global companies—including in oil and gas.
“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” Freeman told Politico. “We have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.” Asked about what a better strategy would look like, she admitted that she “struggled” to articulate it, but offered up two ideas: more fracked gas, and making it easier to permit energy infrastructure. This is not a new strategy at all, but the same old industry-friendly playbook: slow the transition to renewables in the name of a “bridge” fuel, and make it easier for fossil fuel infrastructure to dodge the environmental review process and public-interest litigation that has dogged short-sighted projects like the Willow Project.
Freeman hasn’t updated her priors since the “all of the above” energy politics of the Obama administration in which she served. But over the past decade, research into natural gas’s impact on warming the planet has dramatically evolved. Methane leaks at every stage of the gas supply chain, and is majorly undercounted by national inventories. This is especially alarming because methane has over 80 times more warming power than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after its release. In 2022, gas pipelines in the Permian Basin were found to leak at rates 14 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate.
Freeman served on ConocoPhillips’s board of directors from 2013 to 2023, making over $350,000 a year from the oil and gas giant. She resigned after pushback from Harvard students and activists during the fight against the Willow Project, ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion drilling effort in the Alaskan wilderness. But she has retained her position on the climate advisory board at Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. The fund, whose current value is estimated to be around $1.75 trillion, is commonly known as the Oil Fund because it exists to invest the nation’s substantial petroleum revenue in global companies—including in oil and gas.
“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” Freeman told Politico. “We have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.” Asked about what a better strategy would look like, she admitted that she “struggled” to articulate it, but offered up two ideas: more fracked gas, and making it easier to permit energy infrastructure. This is not a new strategy at all, but the same old industry-friendly playbook: slow the transition to renewables in the name of a “bridge” fuel, and make it easier for fossil fuel infrastructure to dodge the environmental review process and public-interest litigation that has dogged short-sighted projects like the Willow Project.
Freeman hasn’t updated her priors since the “all of the above” energy politics of the Obama administration in which she served. But over the past decade, research into natural gas’s impact on warming the planet has dramatically evolved. Methane leaks at every stage of the gas supply chain, and is majorly undercounted by national inventories. This is especially alarming because methane has over 80 times more warming power than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after its release. In 2022, gas pipelines in the Permian Basin were found to leak at rates 14 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate.
https://prospect.org/environment/2025-06-20-why-is-former-obama-official-attacking-left-climate-jody-freeman/
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
