Karen Skelton is a Senior Advisor at DGA Group and is based in Sacramento. With more than 35 years of experience advising U.S. Presidents, Vice Presidents, Cabinet Secretaries and Fortune 100 corporations, she leverages her expertise to help clients navigate the complexities of the energy transition, one of the most significant issues facing businesses and organizations today.

Currently, Ms. Skelton serves as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, where she lectures and writes about America’s energy transition and the implications of the 2024 elections on its pace and scale.

Most recently, Ms. Skelton served as a Senior Policy Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and John Podesta, President Joe Biden’s top Climate Diplomat. Her work during this period was pivotal in shaping political, policy and communications strategies that accelerated the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy. Her collaborative efforts with private sector stakeholders – including venture funds, equity firms, banks and non-profits – helped secure access to hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, tax credits and loans.

Ms. Skelton joined the Biden-Harris Administration from California, where she spent two

decades running and selling two companies. She founded Skelton Strategies in 2011, a policy and political consulting firm working on energy, climate, technology, telecommunications and women’s health. She 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, she founded and managed a series of groundbreaking reports on the transformational role of women in American life, including an Emmy-nominated documentary.

Earlier in her career, Ms. 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 United States Department of Transportation as Chief Counsel of the Federal Highway Administration.

Ms. Skelton earned her B.A. in English with honors from UCLA, an M.A. from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley Law School.