Climate responsibility firm F Minus will publish a report linking Harvard to Tesla via a common lobbying firm, Tremont Strategies, and is calling on the University to distance itself from the lobbyists.
F Minus, a 2023 climate accountability organization, releases lists of lobbying firms that represent both climate advocacy organizations and fossil fuel corporations to highlight the loyalties of these lobbying firms to conflicting client objectives.
We apply all those tags in order to begin to tell the story of the ways in which the fossil fuel lobbying these companies are doing is hurting some of their other clients, or working against what their other clients are attempting to achieve on climate,” James Browning, director and founder of F Minus, explained. “Then there’s also an advocacy piece where we call on these other clients to drop these fossil fuel lobbying firms,” he added.
Tremont Strategies did not comment on requests. Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO, also leads the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has eliminated over $60 million from the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget since Trump was sworn in in January, and cancelled over 400 grants aimed at air and water quality and extreme weather resilience of communities nationwide.
Browning stated that in collaborating with lobbyist companies affiliated with Tesla, Harvard and other institutions are sanctioned the company’s work with Musk.
“They’re kind of normalizing and empowering this company to do business with Musk and DOGE who are among the largest threats on climate in general today,”
Browning stated.
Harvard representative Amy Kamosa did not respond to Harvard’s collaboration with Tremont Strategies.
Harvard is working in association with Tremont Strategies presently on the Allston I-90 Multimodal Project, an infrastructure development project to replace existing highway ramps with a new grid system permitting development on University-owned land.
Meanwhile, Harvard has made its own climate commitments. Harvard aims to be fossil fuel neutral by 2026, according to the University’s Sustainability Office. Browning indicated that he thinks it’s “incompatible with Harvard’s values” to hire Tremont Strategies.
F Minus has effectively pushed universities to sever their relationships with lobbying companies previously. They pushed John Hopkins University out of its relationship with a “coal lobbyist,” Browning reports. But he acknowledged Harvard might be reluctant to switch lobbying companies since the I-90 project is still in planning stages.
Cole A. Cochrane ’27, Policy Director of the Harvard Undergraduate Clean Energy Group, added that he wishes Harvard would sever its ties with Tremont Strategies to make a statement regarding their top “interests, priorities, and principles.”
“When you’ve got an institution like Harvard, say one thing and do another, I think that sends a double standard to the public and to other institutions, corporations or even academic institutions broadly in the United States,”
Cochrane said
“They’re an example for not just the United States, but the world,”
he continued.
“We ought not to have hypocrisy as an institution that is all about being honest.”
