[GPSCC-chat] Fw: [350 SV Chat] The climate action woman powering Tom Steyer's work

[Caroline Yacoub]

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From: Janet S <janet.stromberg at gmail.com>
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Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:04 PM
Subject: [350 SV Chat] The climate action woman powering Tom Steyer's work
  


Hi all,

Thought you might enjoy this profile of Kate Gordon. She's speaking tonight at Acterra (who knows maybe some of you are there). Her Risky Business project looks good: http://riskybusiness.org/about


http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059994329/print


NEWSMAKER:  
Steyer's secret weapon emerges as power in climate debate  
Anne C. Mulkern, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Monday, February 10, 2014 
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- High-profile billionaire and 
environmental activist Tom Steyer held center stage at an event here, 
speaking about energy and politics to an audience of business power 
players. There were few surprises -- until the end. 
In his final minutes, Steyer announced that he planned to launch an 
effort to quantify what inaction on climate change could cost the 
country. When a reporter afterward raced for Steyer, he begged off 
questions, waving for his aide, Kate Gordon. 
Sitting in the near-empty auditorium after the event, Gordon 
explained the plan. She also revealed an important detail: The study was her idea, one she had long waited to put into action. 
"I've wanted to do this for five years, and I never felt like I was 
in the right place to do it until working with Tom," Gordon said. 
Steyer's San Francisco-based nonprofit policy shop, Next Generation, 
offered the perfect perch to launch the effort, she said, because "we're not in Washington. We're not an environmental group. We're not 
identified as having a particular dog in the fight." 
Kate Gordon, Next Generation vice president and director for energy and climate. Photo courtesy of Next Generation. 
That study on climate inaction now is underway. Called Risky Business, it's 
headed by Steyer, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and 
George W. Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. 
Gordon, 40, is the Risky Business executive director. She determines strategy; coordinates with the co-chairmen and economists; and talks to interested people with environmental groups, businesses and the media. 
"It's what needs to happen in the climate debate right now," Gordon 
said. "What it really is is a way to shift the conversation to an 
entirely different way of talking about climate." 
Those who know Gordon say it shows how, from behind the scenes, 
she's helping write the script on environmental action in the United 
States. 
Risky Business is her latest effort directed at driving change. 
Before joining Steyer's nonprofit, she spent a decade crafting reports 
and analyses that several people said influenced state and federal 
policies, including the green jobs movement and elements of President 
Obama's stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. 
Over the past 20 months, Gordon has guided Steyer as he's emerged as a political force. She said she's advised him on issues that include 
climate change, energy investment, renewable electricity and energy 
policy. For the first year of his advocacy, she prepared him for 
meetings, supplied briefs about issues he was advocating and crafted 
many of his speeches. 
Now she's executing her goal of quantifying climate inaction with Steyer's backing and resources. The magazine Campaigns & Elections in November included Gordon on its list of the 50 influencers to watch 
ahead of the 2014 election cycle, citing her role in the Risky Business 
study on climate change costs. 
"She understands how the game is played, how power is exerted and 
how to pull the right levers," said Adam Browning, co-founder of 
advocacy group Vote Solar and an activist who has worked with Gordon on 
green issues. 
"Not everybody knows how to put together a campaign that succeeds," 
he added. "It's actually a rarer skill than you might think. She knows 
how to do it." 
'This is a massive goal' 
The aim of the Risky Business climate study is to get people 
thinking about the issue in a different way, Gordon said during an 
interview in Next Generation's San Francisco office, which features faux wood floors and a view of the Transamerica building. 
A big challenge in dealing with climate change, she said, is that 
people can feel it's so overwhelming, their actions won't make a 
difference. She wants to move the conversation past resignation to 
optimism. 
"My biggest goal is ... to make this something people care about," 
Gordon said, but to also make them "want to take action and be really at the forefront and be leaders on figuring out kind of a new way of doing business and moving away from fossil fuels. 
"It will not just take us. This is a massive goal," she added. "It will take everybody working together." 
Gordon understands good policy and knows the political routes to 
achieving it, said Matt James, executive director at Next Generation and co-founder of the group along with Steyer and his brother Jim Steyer. 
"She's very pragmatic and understands how all of that is knitted together, and not everybody does," James said. 
Gordon presented the Risky Business study idea to him and then to Tom Steyer, who, James said, "got it right away." 
Gordon helped recruit the effort's new Risk Committee, which 
features several well-known names. There are three people from former 
President Clinton's Cabinet: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development 
Henry Cisneros, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala. Two Republicans are on board: former 
Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Reagan administration Secretary of State George Shultz. Others on the panel are Alfred Sommer of Johns Hopkins 
Bloomberg School of Public Health and Gregory Page, former CEO and 
current chairman of the board of Cargill Inc. 
One of the goals was "bringing in unlikely voices," James said. 
"Kate has really driven that project and has thought through who 
should be involved, how we involve them, how we create a broader 
platform to talk about climate than frankly just sort of the typical 
actors that have been out there," James said. "That's a big part of what Tom wants to accomplish. He knows that we're not going to get there 
unless we bring business along." 
Picking the right messengers 
The idea of quantifying the costs of ignoring climate change isn't 
new, said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate 
strategy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that has 
advised the Obama administration. Gordon was a vice president at CAP 
until 2012 and worked with Weiss. 
Kate Gordon enjoys family time, from left to right Gino Segrè, Jacob Segrè, 
Kate Gordon and Julia Segrè. Photo courtesty Gino Segrè.
In fact, Weiss said, he was at a February 2012 meeting with the then-head 
of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, when 
there was talk of doing an analysis like the one from British economist 
Nicholas Stern. Completed for the British government in 2006, the Stern 
Review looked at how warming would affect the global economy. 
The belief voiced at the meeting with Krueger and others, Weiss 
said, was that in the U.S. a similar study would be discredited if it 
came from the Obama administration. 
Gordon understands that it's not just the message that matters in 
politics, he said, but ensuring that it comes from the right messengers. Having Paulson as part of Risky Business is "critical to increasing the credibility," Weiss said. 
Gordon and Next Generation "deserve great credit for making this 
idea into a reality, and recruiting a board/oversight committee of great economic renown who will be forceful, credible and effective 
messengers," Weiss said in an email. 
The Risky Business report, if completed before the 2014 elections, 
"could provide supporters of action on climate change with a very strong shield to argue that inaction on climate change will significantly harm the economy," Weiss said. 
One critic, however, said he doubted that the Risky Business panel 
would be viewed as impartial. Many on it support policies that would 
reduce fossil fuel use, said Thomas Pyle, president of the American 
Energy Alliance, a nonprofit focused on free-market advocacy. He is a 
former Koch Industries lobbyist. 
"I don't see anyone on the list who I would see as rounding out the 
opinions about the need for action on climate change," Pyle said. To be 
truly comprehensive, he added, the report would also need to look at the economic costs of ramping down fossil fuels. 
Pyle also questioned Gordon's assessment that running the study out 
of Steyer's nonprofit is more advantageous than if she had launched it 
when she worked at the Center for American Progress. 
"They're virtually indistinguishable," Pyle said of Steyer and CAP. 
"Clearly, Tom Steyer has made the latter part of his career making this 
issue the focus of his political activity. ... He has been very 
one-sided in terms of his politics in that regard." 
CAP founder John Podesta now is a White House adviser, Pyle said, 
and Steyer "may have a little bit more independence, but he certainly is in lock step with what I would call the harder elements of the left on 
this issue." 
Pyle said he does not know Gordon and was speaking about the Risky Business strategy but not her personally. 
Influencing Obama's first legislation 
Gordon is poised for potential success with Risky Business, but her 
efforts should be seen as part of a push that has spanned generations, a former colleague said. 
"She has put in the time and she has built the base of personal 
relationships and she's positioned herself to be incredibly impactful 
right now in the moment we're in," said Bracken Hendricks, a senior 
fellow at CAP. "It's not that other people failed and now she's going to come along with some special sauce or some secret formula. Rather she's done the work to be in the right place with a very relevant tool set." 
Gordon came to activism after growing up in two economic worlds. 
After her parents divorced, she lived part time with her father, a 
Stanford University law professor, in Palo Alto, Calif., and part with 
her mother, an advocate for low-income seniors and people who were 
homeless in the east side of Madison, Wis. 
After her undergraduate degree, she worked as a tenant organizer in 
San Francisco's Tenderloin district, motivated by "a general sense of 
economic injustice." She went to law school and earned a joint master's 
degree in city planning. Three years later, she took a job at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, known as COWS, a think tank based at the 
University of Wisconsin, Madison. That introduced her to the energy 
world. 
Joel Rogers, director of COWS, in cooperation with the Washington, 
D.C.-based Institute for America's Future, had just launched the Apollo 
Alliance. That coalition united business, labor, environment and 
community groups that advocated for green energy. 
"He needed someone to start thinking about clean energy as an 
economic development driver, so he threw me at it," Gordon said. "It was a real trial by fire." 
Gordon was at Apollo when the alliance made its push for green jobs. She came at the issue first from an economic versus an environmental 
viewpoint, said Hendricks, a past executive director at Apollo. 
"There are probably a half a dozen people who all deserve a big 
piece of the credit" for advancing green jobs, Hendricks said. "She's 
certainly one of them." 
In 2009 Gordon was co-director at Apollo when the organization published its 10-point "Apollo Economic Recovery Act," which it argued should be part of President Obama's first legislative 
measure. Elements of it were nearly identical to components that later 
appeared in the stimulus package, Gordon said. That led some 
conservatives to assert that Apollo crafted the legislation. 
Radio host Glenn Beck on his Aug. 24, 2009, show said the Apollo 
Alliance "wrote the bill," according to an online transcript on his 
website. He did not cite Gordon by name. 
Asked whether she penned parts of the stimulus bill, Gordon said 
that "there are pieces of that [Apollo plan], in particular around clean energy manufacturing, that you can see in the manufacturing tax credits that were passed." There also were pieces that were in the energy 
efficiency block grants program, she said. 
"Many, many people were involved, but we certainly, I think, had an influence," Gordon added. 
Gordon while detailing her work history commented that she'd had 
good timing, landing in the right spots as key events were underway. 
"I've been lucky in all these transitions," she said. 
Then, as if she'd caught herself, she added that Facebook Chief 
Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg -- who in her book "Lean In" wrote 
about women and business success -- "says I shouldn't say that." 
Asked whether men have gotten credit for her work, Gordon said that 
"a lot of what I do is sort of helping the movement generally." But she 
added that she's long been a woman in environments dominated by men. 
"I work with energy, and I work with labor, and I work on 
manufacturing," she said. "I'm almost always the only woman in the room. When I was a CAP, every single senior member of my team was a man." 
There have been times in her career when she was asked to take notes, she said, because she had "the best handwriting." 
"That kind of thing happens all the time," she said, adding that she wouldn't let it go unnoticed. "You just have to get to a place where 
you call it out for what it is. ... It's certainly been an issue in my 
career, no question." 
Shaping Next Generation's 'voice' 
Gordon met Steyer in 2011 while she was working as vice president in charge of the energy program at CAP. Later that year, Gordon wrote an 
opinion piece for him and CAP founder Podesta that ran in The Wall Street Journal in January 2012, urging the need for investments in clean energy. The 
two were involved in crafting the final version, she said. 
A short time later, Gordon learned that Steyer was looking for a new director for Next Generation and let it be known she'd be interested. 
She was hired and moved there in June 2012, without taking a day off 
between the two jobs. 
Kate Gordon is a key adviser to Tom Steyer, billionaire environmental activist. Photo by Anne C. Mulkern.
A big part of her job at the nonprofit in the first year was preparing 
Steyer for events and guiding him in his advocacy. By default, that has 
made her other work there less noticeable, she said. 
"He has a very important voice in the movement," Gordon said, "but you could certainly argue that it puts me in the background." 
Steyer, in an email, called Gordon "a trusted policy adviser and key member of the Next Generation team." 
"Her guidance and leadership continues to be instrumental to our 
efforts to combat climate change as we work to identify strategies to 
deploy clean, advanced energy technologies," Steyer said. "Her 
leadership in launching Risky Business ... is a key example of Kate's 
drive to seek innovative solutions." 
Among her roles at Next Generation, Gordon said, is communicating 
the group's ideas. Steyer, his brother and James started the group in 
2011 because they believed "that strategic communications voice was 
missing from California," Gordon said. 
"I know how to talk about these issues in a way that speaks to 
people beyond the environmental community," Gordon said. "I'm a good 
translator of policy issues and vision and values to a much broader 
group of people. 
"I'm a big-picture person," she added. "I care a lot about setting an agenda, having a big vision on issues." 
Gordon writes a blog sent to about 4,000 subscribers, a combination 
of Capitol Hill staffers, California Legislature aides, reporters and 
people with advocacy groups. A lot of people read her emailed 
"Cliffnotes," she said. 
"I get approached at parties by people in different sectors who read them," Gordon said. "What people always say is that I have a unique way of telling these issues that isn't just confined to a small insider 
group." 
Burning midnight oil 
At Next Generation, Gordon also advocates on climate on many fronts. She's worked on the implementation of Proposition 39, a 2012 California ballot measure that Steyer largely funded. It changed how multistate 
businesses are taxed over five years and will funnel an estimated $2.75 
billion in new revenues to energy efficiency measures. She helped shape 
legislation governing how the money will be spent and last month was 
named to a citizen's committee that will vet the allocations (Greenwire, Jan. 17). 
In addition, she's now part of a group of advocates conferring on 
ways California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia will move 
forward together on actions to combat climate change. The leaders of 
those states and the Canadian province in October signed an agreement to join efforts. There is hope that the alliance could influence federal 
action (ClimateWire, Oct. 29, 2013). 
Acting as a consultant outside her Next Generation post, she'll also be advising Steyer on strategies as he pushes to increase the 
California tax levied on oil companies for each barrel extracted in the 
state. His political action committee NextGen Climate Action last month 
launched a statewide campaign to advocate for the change. 
Gordon similarly has been working with Steyer on his opposition to 
the Keystone XL pipeline. She consults with his political action 
committee, she said, weighing in with research and background and 
offering advice. 
The myriad goals have Gordon frequently traveling from coast to 
coast and conferring with allies or writing blogs late at night. A 
mother of two young children, she averages about 6½ hours of sleep a 
night. 
"I do a lot of work between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m.," Gordon said. 
If Gordon has detractors on these issues, they aren't eager to speak out about her specifically. There are those, however, who questioned 
the wisdom of the choices Steyer and his advisers have made on Keystone 
XL and the California tax push. 
"Mr. Steyer has made his antipathy toward petroleum energy 
well-known," said Tupper Hull, spokesman for trade group Western States 
Petroleum Association. "He is opposed to importing Canada's oil through 
the Keystone XL pipeline, he supports raising taxes on domestic energy 
production in California and he opposes well completion technologies 
like hydraulic fracturing. 
"One has to wonder where Mr. Steyer believes Californians should get their essential gasoline and diesel supplies if he is successful in 
closing off affordable domestic supplies," Hull added. 
Others said Gordon has offered sage advice on a number of energy issues and is effective in securing change. 
"She has background, experience, relationships, credibility, brains 
and a strategic perspective," said Susan Frank, who has worked with 
Gordon on protecting California's climate policies and advancing similar ones in the region. Frank has several posts including director of the 
California Business Alliance for a Green Economy. "All of those things 
together make her a really good person to have in the room when you're 
talking about climate policy." 
In terms of 2014, Frank said, "because Steyer is so engaged in 
elections and is spending money on campaigns and we know Kate is a key 
adviser if not the key adviser, we know she is important to that 
election." 


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