Freeman steered those institutions toward his vision of them, often without compromise or patience for opposing points of view, said Jerilyn López Mendoza, who served with him on Los Angeles’ Board of Harbor Commissioners.As the commission’s president, Freeman oversaw a push in the 2000s to clean up the air in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
White clashed with Freeman over what he called the “gun to the head” contracts Freeman signed during the crisis. “He signed $40 billion worth of contracts in 30 days, and on the whole, I told Dave we kind of got rolled,” White said. “And he completely defended them and said: You don’t know what you’re talking about.”, Freeman would embrace cleaner, renewable sources of energy.
He was “pretty conventional about nuclear power and the whole power business,” he told the historian Harry Kriesler, until the day two women from New Hampshire came to his office in the White House. There were plans to build a nuclear power plant near their homes, they told him, but they had done some research and figured that if people in their area simply conserved energy, there was no need for nuclear power.
“I listened to them, and I checked it out, and they were right,” Freeman recalled. “All of a sudden, it was like a light bulb went off in my head that we were just wasting a tremendous amount of electricity, and we didn’t need to build as many plants as we thought we needed to build, because it’s cheaper to conserve. That didn’t mean we didn’t need to build anything, but we just didn’t need to build that many.
Freeman remained fiery into his ninth decade, White said, recalling his 90th birthday party in Sacramento. After the party, he insisted on attending a board meeting for SMUD, the utility he led two decades earlier. White said Freeman stood up and told the utility’s directors: “You ain’t doing enough, and you’re resting on your laurels!”In his later years, Freeman became known as the “Green Cowboy,” both for his advocacy and his trademark hat.
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