Kate Gordon

Kate Gordon is an American lawyer, urban planner, non-profit advisor, and leader in the "green jobs" and climate risk movement.

In 2021, she became Senior Advisor to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm at the United States Department of Energy.

The project was founded in October 2013, when the three co-chairs founded a new initiative to assess and publicize the economic risks to the U.S. associated with climate change.

The project grew out of concerns by the co-chairs that the U.S. was not developing sound risk assessments to respond to the impacts of a changing climate.

In their development of this initiative, the three founders recruited additional members to forge the Project's Risk Committee, which expended to include corporate executives and senior government officials.

Gordon took on this project in her role as Senior Vice President for Climate and Energy at Next Generation, a non-partisan think tank based in San Francisco, where she worked on California policy development as well as large-scale national communications and research projects.

Earlier in her career, Gordon served as Vice President of Energy and Environment at the Washington D.C.-based Center for American Progress, where she helped develop and author policy recommendations and Congressional testimony related to the cap and trade negotiations, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and American Reinvestment and Recovery Act implementation.

Prior to CAP, Gordon was a senior associate at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), and co-director of the national Apollo Alliance (currently part of the Blue Green Alliance).

Before this, she was a consumer rights and employment litigator at the Public Justice Foundation.

Gordon received an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University.

Gordon earned a J.D. and master's degree in city planning from the University of California-Berkeley.

Peer-reviewed journals in bold

In 2019, she was appointed by Governor of California Gavin Newsom to lead the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research.

Before that appointment, Gordon served as an independent consultant and Senior Advisor at the Paulson Institute, where she provides strategic support on issues related to climate change and sustainable economic growth.

She is also a nonresident Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal as one of the paper's “Energy Experts". She currently serves on the non-profit boards of Vote Solar, Center for Carbon Removal, and the American Jobs Project and writes a regular newsletter on clean energy and climate called "Kate's Cliffnotes"

Gordon is a nationally recognized expert on the intersection of clean energy and economic development.

Before joining the Paulson Institute, she was the Founding Director of the "Risky Business Project]", co-chaired by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, and business leader and philanthropist Tom Steyer, and focused on the economic risks the U.S. faces from unmitigated climate change.