Subject: June 17 and the Packard Board meeting
From: Carol Larson <[email-masked]>
To: John Podesta <[email-masked]>
Cc: Walt Reid <[email-masked]>, Cathy Winter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 02:15:06 +0000

Dear John,

It was great to see you at the December ClimateWorks Board meeting.  You met Jim Leape at the dinner for Jamshyd.  Jim spoke a bit with you about the peat fire issues in Indonesia.  We continue to hope there will be better progress in curbing these fires.  I'm back in Indonesia now to meet with the President's director of a new Peat Agency (actually a person who worked on behalf of CLUA  up until now).  We are hopeful there will be new attention within the government to this issue.

I am writing about another matter now.  Our Packard Board will be spending the morning of Friday, June 17 focusing on climate change, including follow up from Paris and the work of ClimateWorks.  Would it be possible for you to participate in this session on the morning of June 17?  We would love to host you at our Los Altos offices, but if necessary, we could arrange for you to join by video.  Charlotte Pera will also attend.

By way of background, I believe you know that the Packard Foundation has been supporting work on climate change since 1998 when we made our first grants to establish the China Sustainable Energy Program (now Energy Foundation-China).  As you know we were one of the founding donors that helped to establish the ClimateWorks Foundation and we also have played leading roles in creating the Funders Table and the Climate and Land Use Alliance.  In 2015 we awarded approximately $52 million in grants for work on climate mitigation.  In 2015 we also made climate-related impact investments totaling $20 million.

At our June 17 meeting, we would like to discuss with the Board the implications of the Paris agreement for climate mitigation strategies - both global and national - in the coming years.  Given your involvement in some of the most important events leading up to Paris and your continued engagement with these issues in your various current roles, I know that the Board would be extremely interested in hearing your views on the implications of Paris and what you see may be changing in the landscape in the next few years and what may remain the same.  By virtue of our reliance on a number of intermediaries like CWF, the Energy Foundation, Shakti, and the European Climate Foundation, as well as our own direct grantmaking on climate and land use issues, we are currently supporting work on almost all aspects of climate mitigation in all of the major emitting nations and regions.  Your insights into how this field is evolving will be extremely helpful to us as we think about how our grantmaking and impact investments can be most effectively deployed in the coming years.

I recognize that it may be unrealistic for you to travel here for a 2-hour board session unless there are other reasons for you to be on the West Coast.  While we hope you might be able to join us in person, if it works better for you to do this by video-conference we would be happy to make arrangements for that.

I do hope that you will be able to take part in this session of our Board meeting!

Happy New Year!

Carol