Karen Skelton
At a glance
Served as Political Director to Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton-Gore Administration and held leadership roles at the U.S. Departments of Justice and Transportation.
Founded Skelton Strategies, a consulting firm focused on energy, climate, and women's health.
Advised on climate policy for Governor Jerry Brown and the Biden-Harris Administration, contributing to clean energy initiatives and industrial policy.
Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy with degrees from UCLA, Harvard, and UC Berkeley.
Karen Skelton is a Senior Advisor with Boundary Stone Partners and is based in Sacramento, CA.
Skelton served in the Clinton-Gore Administration as Vice President Al Gore’s first Political Director and Deputy Political Director to the President, in the U.S. Departments of Justice as a prosecutor, and at the U.S. Department of Transportation as Chief Counsel of the Federal Highway Administration. Skelton spent a decade as the founder of Skelton Strategies, a policy and political consulting firm working on energy, climate, technology, economic justice, and women’s health issues. Skelton served as Governor Jerry Brown's Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Global Climate Action Summit, where she drove high-level corporate commitments designed to combat climate change. With Maria Shriver, Skelton founded and managed a series of groundbreaking reports on the transformational role of women in American life, including an Emmy-nominated documentary. Clients included Governor Schwarzenegger’s Women’s Conference, HBO, Bloom Energy, Segway, the National Basketball Association, UCLA’s Baseball team, T-Mobile, Google, YouTube, Amazon, John Doerr and Mayor Willie Brown.
During the Biden-Harris administration, Skelton served as a Senior Policy Advisor to both Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and the President’s top Climate Diplomat, John Podesta. During this time, Skelton played a key role in managing political, policy, and communication strategies to accelerate the nation’s industrial policy transition to a clean energy economy. Skelton collaborated with private sector stakeholders to gain access to hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, tax credits, loans, and other investments that address the climate crisis, rebuild American manufacturing, and lower costs for consumers and businesses.
Her work included co-leading the establishment of the Interagency Working Group on Coal & Power Plant Communities & Economic Revitalization, now responsible for delivering over $170 billion in federal resources to help revitalize America’s energy communities; organizing private and public sector engagement in key states as Congress considered support for the Inflation Reduction Act; managing a White House effort to build a coalition of philanthropies, which have contributed so far over $3 billion in pooled funds and aligned tables to implement the President’s climate initiatives, heading the inaugural launch of DOE’s Foundation of Energy Security and Innovation.
Skelton is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in the Precourt Institute for Energy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She earned her B.A. in English with Honors from UCLA, a Master’s degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley Law School. She lives in Sacramento with her husband, a life-long public defender, and has two grown daughters and one lively Brittany Spaniel.
