Mark Gallogly, secretive mogul with climate-related investment interests, is advising Biden team on climate

Gallogly, an uber-wealthy Manhattan campaign donor who invests in climate-related businesses, as an expert advisor to John Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate.The Biden administration, which campaigned in part on restoring trust in government in the wake of the Trump White House's contempt for ethics laws and transparency, won't speak Gallogly's name in public. A good chunk of that cash — nearly $5 million — went to Biden and other Democratic candidates and causes in the latest election cycle.The FEC records show something else: In mid-March, the newly retired investment mogul began listing his employer on donation paperwork as the State Department and his title as "Expert Senior Advisor." That appears to be the only public documentation that Gallogly works for taxpayers now.This isn't the first time the Biden team has stepped between Gallogly and the public eye. Citing anonymous sources, The Washington Post said in April that Kerry hired Gallogly "as a liaison to the business community." The team had pitched banks on working together to tackle the climate crisis, sources told Politico in March.Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs had set "net-zero" goals for 2050, though as one observer told Politico, "no one knows what they mean yet, including Kerry's team."Citing unnamed sources, the energy and environment industry journal E&E News said Gallogly had been aiding Kerry by "pressing Wall Street firms" to set shorter-term, interim goals before President Joe Biden's Leaders Summit on Climate in April. Without knowing more about the entity and Gallogly's role in it, Shaub said, it was difficult to tell whether it could pose conflicts of interest.If ethics experts worry that Gallogly's investment portfolio aligns too closely with his policy portfolio, environmental activists point out that for much of his career, the opposite has been true: Centerbridge has invested heavily in the same extractive industries that caused the catastrophe he is tasked with overcoming."It's obviously a terrible, predatory company," said Kate DeAngelis, an international finance program manager with Friends of the Earth.Centerbridge invested in Pacific Gas & Electric, the California utility that has caused some of the worst wildfires in the state's history; the blazes killed dozens of people, destroyed thousands of homes, and consumed hundreds of thousands of acres. "It's certainly worth asking why folks who were directly involved in the corporations and financial firms most responsible [for climate change] are the right people to lead the US government's response to the crisis," she said.In May, a coalition of 26 progressive and left-leaning groups called for Gallogly to be sacked, saying in an open letter to Biden that "we can't fix the climate crisis with vulture capitalism." It was the second such missive: In March, nearly 150 environmental, good-government, and religious groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, Rainforest Action Network, and 350.org wrote to the administration to express disapproval of Gallogly's appointment.They said they "believe Mr. Gallogly will not approach Wall Street with the appropriate level of diplomatic pressure," adding, "We are concerned that he will instead seek to cut deals that will greenwash the damage these institutions are doing to our shared goal of ensuring a safe climate."Kerry has framed the global effort to address the climate crisis as largely market-driven, an approach that many environmentalists say is friendlier to major investors than it is to the rest of the world's population."The marketplace is doing this," the former secretary of state said at a recent White House news conference of shifting capital toward alternative and sustainable energy.