Jody Freeman speaking at a Harvard Law forum last year
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“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.
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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.
ConocoPhillips is a major oil and gas producer in the Permian Basin; its business is so pollution-intensive that in 2019 the Norwegian government told NBIM to divest its $714 million stake in ConocoPhillips, while keeping significant shares in dozens of other oil majors with more diversified assets.
The methane fee in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of the Biden administration’s strongest steps to curb fossil fuel pollution, incentivizing gas operators to curb methane leaks, venting, and flaring by fining “excess” releases above a certain threshold. Now, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking the fee from being implemented. Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a major climate report in 2022 that we have the tools we need to decarbonize; what we lack is the political will. This moment starkly reflects that limitation.
The existential question of what we can still save deserves more than status quo apologism. Freeman embodies the futility of a particular kind of intervention: being the better angel at the tables of powerful decision-makers who profit from continuing business as usual. During her decade-long tenure at ConocoPhillips, abruptly capped during the Willow Project’s controversial advancement, the company increased oil and gas production. Freeman’s current role advising NBIM, the largest single owner of global stocks, owning about 1.5 percent of all shares in the world’s listed companies, magnifies the stakes and limitations of this approach.
Oil to Oil, Gas to Gas
Oil was first discovered offshore of Norway by ConocoPhillips, then known as Phillips, in 1969. Norway established the Oil Fund in 1990 to funnel drilling revenue from companies like Phillips into a diversified fund that invests in international companies, including those same oil and gas companies. As of 2024, the fund owns shares in almost 500 energy and utility companies around the world, including a 4.4 percent stake in BP, a 2.78 percent stake in Shell, a 1.46 percent stake in ExxonMobil, and a 1.14 percent stake in Chevron. NBIM has frozen its 0.86 percent stake in Gazprom during Putin’s war on Ukraine, as the value of its shares cratered from $932.1 million in 2021 to $13.6 million in 2024.
While the fund’s revenue stream comes from oil and gas and continues to be invested in oil and gas, NBIM positions itself as a global leader in responsible investing. Freeman is one of four external advisers brought on in 2023 to NBIM’s climate advisory board to shape their climate action plan and broader management of climate “risk and opportunities.” According to the Oil Fund’s 2025 climate action plan, “It is the goal of our responsible investment management for our portfolio companies to align their activities with global net zero emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.” Yet the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement—to limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit—has likely already been missed. The consequences of exceeding this threshold will be catastrophic for many.
NBIM claims that “the heart of our efforts is driving portfolio companies to net zero emissions by 2050 through credible targets and transition plans for reducing their scope 1, scope 2 and material scope 3 emissions.” But when NBIM votes against climate resolutions brought by other shareholders at oil and gas companies in which they own stakes, it often justifies this by stating that it won’t support shareholder proposals when a company “does not appear to have significant gaps in their management or reporting of the relevant sustainability risk.”
During Freeman’s tenure on NBIM’s climate advisory board, NBIM used that justification to vote against:
- A resolution calling for Southern Company to adopt greenhouse gas emissions targets aligned with the Paris Agreement;
- A resolution calling for Shell to disclose its demand forecast for liquefied natural gas and how its new capital expenditure on gas infrastructure is consistent with its climate commitments;
- Two resolutions calling for Phillips 66 to publish a report on the impacts of reduced virgin plastic demand;
- A resolution calling for NextEra to report on its climate lobbying; and
- A resolution calling for Chevron to commission a third-party assessment of implementation of its human rights policy, among many others.
None of this resembles pushing fossil fuel companies to take action to decarbonize their operations at the speed and scale consistent with global need.
In 2023, NBIM voted against 17 of 21 resolutions at 16 different companies that would have supported better climate management or disclosure, according to a report by Norwegian organization Framtiden i våre hender (The future in our hands). The 21 resolutions examined in the report were a small sample flagged as critical resolutions by advocacy organizations, but the extent of this pattern is likely far greater. NBIM votes on 110,000 resolutions a year, at over 11,000 annual shareholder meetings.
We are currently losing the battle against climate change; that much is clear. But it’s quite the handy misdirection for Freeman, who is used to sitting at the most powerful tables, to place the blame for that on the shoulders of the relatively powerless political left. Climate change is not a “niche left” issue. A 2024 study published in Nature found that an overwhelming global majority—89 percent—want their national governments to do more to fight climate change. The authors described the world as being in “a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act.”
If so many people want to see greater action on climate, what is really standing in the way? Is it the political left? Or maybe it’s those with trillion-dollar houses of cards built on the bedrock of the status quo?
