The WikiLeaks emails reveal a Hillary Clinton campaign team fixated on climate change — yet reluctant to make overly sweeping promises about what they’d do about it.

Campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked inbox offers a veritable road map to the energy policy that Clinton would execute in the White House, as well as clear lessons to the environmental and industry groups that are getting ready to lobby her administration if she wins. And climate change and related issues feature prominently in the approximately 25,000 messages WikiLeaks has released so far from Podesta’s account.


“Climate change” comes up in more than 1,200 of the emails released as of Friday, or more than Obamacare and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant combined — and almost as many as the 1,444 emails that mention the name “Sanders.”

Clinton’s energy proposals have produced fewer easy sound bites than Bernie Sanders’ call to ban fracking or Donald Trump’s promises to put coal miners back to work. But the hacked emails, dating from before and after Podesta joined the campaign after serving as a senior adviser to the Obama White House, show Clinton’s team to be as driven by policy details and the power of pragmatic messaging as the candidate herself — while grappling with the contradictions inherent in a campaign year when grandiose promises are more popular than realistic proposals.

Taxing carbon polls horribly, her advisers fret, but politicians will need to get behind some climate plan to drastically reduce carbon output. Natural gas has spurred jobs and exports, but it produces methane pollution that cries out for regulation. The federal ethanol mandate is arguably failing to deliver its promised gains for national security and the planet, as one aide wrote last year, but calling for reform too loudly risks losing support in corn country.

And Clinton’s team think it’s deeply unrealistic to call for a quick end to oil drilling, as some green groups and Sanders supporters demand — but it’s also fanciful to think that the current U.S. oil boom should continue indefinitely.

Several threads in the emails also detail the choreography Clinton’s aides engaged in before she revealed her long-planned public opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline last year.

Among the biggest themes contained in the emails: Like Obama, Clinton wants the left to push her.

President Barack Obama accepted his nomination for reelection in 2012 with a call for “shared responsibility,” effectively reminding liberals dissatisfied with his record at that point that it was their job to lobby him in their direction. Green activists listened and kept pushing. They cheered as Obama sloughed off the “all-of-the-above ” energy rhetoric of his first term and spent significant political capital on global warming, from regulations on power plants to the recently ratified Paris climate deal.

The Clinton team whose private discussions WikiLeaks is dragging into public view appears in the mold of Obama, wary of unrealistic proposals from the left but ready to engage with critics who want more.

The presidential front-runner’s private quip that anti-fossil fuel activists should “ get a life,” seen in context, reads like more of a rejoinder to remove their heads from the clouds than a personal slam.

The heat of the Democratic primary produced its share of clashes within the front-runner’s campaign.

On the one hand, Clinton aides teed off on Sanders’ proposed fracking ban as “extreme, unfeasible” and disconnected from the economic benefits of increased U.S. natural gas production. On the other hand, they responded when forced to reckon with a data-driven case from the environmental left. When Clinton aide Josh Schwerin suggested slamming primary rival Martin O’Malley for urging an end to all fossil-fuel use by 2050, Podesta overruled him with the admonition that “close to a zero carbon energy sector” is needed to make good on the nation’s pledges for massive cuts in greenhouse gases.

The emails also show that at least some communications went on between the environmental left and the Clinton campaign.

Lucy Waletzky, a Clinton donor, physician and member of the Rockefeller family, asked the campaign in February for “more commitments” to address the health effects of fracking, the technology behind the oil and gas boom. And a few exchanges show Podesta sought to use green mega-donor Tom Steyer to reach out to Bill McKibben, a top leader of the climate protest movement. After the president’s former Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe harshly criticized the Obama administration’s climate rule for power plants, Podesta wrote to Steyer asking him to “get your pall [sic] McKibben to organize Harvard student protests against him.”

Waletzky told POLITICO she has “a lot of confidence” that Clinton would be able to rein in fracking, even though “she can’t do all of what any one person might want.” And she acknowledged that overturning a George W. Bush-era restriction on fracking regulations — the so-called Halliburton loophole, which Clinton often pledges to end — is “not going to happen” given its breadth of industry and GOP support.

McKibben argues that the emails contain no surprises and should motivate green activists to keep up the fight after Election Day. “The honeymoon won’t last 10 minutes; on November 9 we’ll be organizing for science and human rights and against the timid incrementalism that marks her approach,” he wrote in The Nation this week.

The emails also shed light on Clinton’s cautious approach to issues that carry special weight with key constituencies or split public opinion, which her team of pollsters painstakingly tracks.

Even as the campaign treads carefully around issues without clear public support, it works to avoid getting pinned down in areas where a future deal could be cut.

Consider the federal ethanol mandate, a sacrosanct policy in farm states like Iowa that Clinton has vowed to protect amid increasing criticism from both the oil industry and environmentalists.

Interest in shaping Clinton’s stance on the ethanol rule is so keen that its defenders were rattled when news reports emerged this summer about her campaign meeting with a critic of the policy. But on two occasions, the emails show the campaign working hard to keep its options open.

After then-White House climate adviser Dan Utech advised Clinton’s aides in April 2015 to talk about “making the [ethanol rule] more effective,” Podesta dubbed that careful phrase “the reform graph.”

Another Clinton aide, Dan Schwerin, proposed another tweak to the language to leave “maximum flexibility down the road.”

The following month, Schwerin forwarded a news report on “Clinton’s Mend-It-Don’t-End-It” ethanol strategy and added: “I’d say we successfully ‘threaded the needle’ yet again!”

A similar cautiousness on a carbon tax is evident from the emails. Clinton’s pollsters found last year that the policy is especially susceptible to attack, even as a majority of voters say they want immediate action on climate change. Support for a carbon tax whose revenue would be rebated to offset higher energy costs started with 58 percent support, compared with 35 percent opposition in a March 2015 poll conducted for Clinton’s campaign. But after pollsters tested arguments for and against the proposal, support led opposition by just 1 percentage point.

“[W]e have done extensive polling on carbon tax,” Podesta told Clinton policy director Jake Sullivan before the poll was conducted. “It all sucks.”

Policy advisers included a greenhouse gas fee among the options they outlined for Clinton to build on Obama’s climate agenda in a detailed March 2015 memo. But they were forthright about its limitations and offered a more modest approach that the candidate ultimately embraced, which calls for rewarding states and cities that pursue ambitious emissions cuts.

On two other, more niche environmental issues, the WikiLeaks emails show Podesta keeping abreast of how best to promote climate-hawkish policies.

In March 2015, veteran environmental lawyer Richard Ayres sent Podesta a summary of a legal battle green groups were waging to temporarily suspend the federal coal leasing program in order to subject it to a new, full-scale environmental review. It would take another 10 months for the Obama administration to embrace that review on its own, and Clinton was ready by then to stand behind a decision that infuriated a coal industry whose workers she has struggled to woo.

Later that year, Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp thanked Podesta “for reaching out” on methane and passed along messaging as well as policy advice on regulating the oil and gas industry’s emissions of the potent greenhouse gas.

The emails also show a potential for some 2015-style deal-making on energy policy.

When congressional Republicans escalated their push to repeal the decades-old ban on crude oil exports during last year’s government funding talks, environmentalists howled that the policy amounted to little more than a bailout for the industry.

But Clinton publicly stayed open to allowing exports if an agreement could “strike the right balance.” In the emails, she barely adjusted that stance even after Congress and the White House cut a deal that lifted the ban and included a five-year extension and phase-out of green-energy tax credits.

A debate handbook from December, released by WikiLeaks, recommended that Clinton praise the year-end exports deal if it came up, while lamenting that she “would have liked to see real concessions from the oil and gas industry.”

Coupled with Clinton’s predilection for pragmatism and her past support for the geopolitical benefits of gas exports during her corporate speeches, her careful messaging on the exports-for-tax-credits deal suggests that she’d be looking to cut more bargains in that vein if she’s elected.

While Clinton may have mocked environmentalists in private remarks to union members, newly public excerpts from her other previously private speeches show that she frequently caveats her support for new energy infrastructure with a recognition of the environmental consequences of fossil fuel development.

“I'm not crazy about the consequences of natural gas with the release of methane but it is replacing coal,” she says in an excerpt from a February 2014 speech at the University of Miami.

“Now, that is a tremendous opportunity, as long as we are smart about it,” Clinton told a San Diego law firm in September 2014. “And we have to start by being smart about making sure we extract oil and gas in ways that don't destroy water tables, leak methane into the air, undermine the quality of life for people who live near the wells.”

Perhaps the least shocking development outlined in the hacked emails is the campaign’s struggles to prevent rebellion among building trade unions that supported Keystone. Yet that dynamic has only intensified this year as Clinton stays out of activists’ fight to block the Dakota Access pipeline, whose fate has become an even bigger worry for the oil industry than Keystone’s was.

Nikki Budzinski, Clinton’s labor outreach director, asked colleagues in February if the candidate could craft a pipeline policy that would let her avoid falling prey to the project-by-project grassroots lobbying strategy that green groups have used against fossil fuel infrastructure.

“She has privately told the building trades that she does not oppose pipelines,” Budzinski wrote. “Can we outline instances where a pipeline would have her support?”

Clinton never released such a blanket statement on pipelines at the time, but she has called for repair and replacement of aging fossil-fuel infrastructure. If she wins the White House, that won’t be enough to mollify emboldened environmentalists, a frustrated oil and gas industry or concerned labor unions.

The emails show little sign of engagement between the campaign and the oil industry, however. The American Petroleum Institute makes a brief cameo when Podesta cites its “very negative reaction” to the May 2015 release of three years’ worth of proposed regulatory targets on ethanol.

Podesta also flagged a group of “really problematic” oil and gas advisers, who carried largely establishment ties, in April 2015.