Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?

She worked on climate change for Obama. Now she’s greenwashing climate change on behalf of Big Oil.

This article was originally published in The American Prospect. Read on the original site.

“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.

Read the rest of the piece on The American Prospect‘s website.

Image Credit: Phillips offshore drilling platform in Norwegian waters by Knudsens Fotosenter / DEXTRA Photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.