In the Biden-Harris administration, Betony served as the senior advisor on labor to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and as director of the office of energy jobs at the US Department of Energy (DOE). In these roles, she led cross-agency efforts to ensure that historic federal investments resulted in job quality and job access across the energy sector and its supply chains. She also led the agency’s workforce and employment-related research and analysis, labor engagement, workforce strategy, and just transition work. She cocreated and led implementation of DOE’s Community Benefits Plan framework, which applied to hundreds of billions of dollars in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act grants and loans to ensure that historic investments would lead to benefits for workers and communities—and, overall, to broadly shared prosperity.
In 2017, Betony founded Inclusive Economics, a research and advisory firm that works at the nexus of climate, labor, and economic equity. She launched the firm after working at the UC Berkeley Labor Center as associate director of the Green Economy program, where she focused on the distributional economic and employment impacts of climate policy. She has authored and coauthored dozens of white papers and policy briefs, including High-Road Workforce Guide for City Climate Action, Prevailing Wage in Solar Can Deliver Good Jobs While Keeping Growth on Track, The Link Between Good Jobs and a Low Carbon Future, How to Achieve Economic Justice in Illinois’s Clean Energy Transition, California Building Decarbonization, and The Economic Impacts of California’s Major Climate Programs on the San Joaquin Valley.
Betony started her career focusing on climate science communications in the Clinton White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. There she saw the economy-wide implications of climate policy as the greatest impediment to—but also greatest opportunity for—comprehensive and durable climate action.
Betony received a master’s degree in social ecology from Yale University and a bachelor of science degree from the University of Michigan.