Oct. 24, 2025
Global Climate Progress in a Trump II World?
Dr. Wolfram, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Dr. Wolfram previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, Dr. Wolfram served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley.
Before leaving for government service, Dr. Wolfram was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard.
Dr. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and market restructuring in the US and UK. Dr. Wolfram is currently working on projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on oil market sanctions.
Dr. Wolfram received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.
Global Climate Progress in a Trump II World?
Global efforts to combat climate change face significant challenges, including declining interest in multilateralism, voter backlash against aggressive climate action and President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.This talk will describe a proposal for a “Heavy Industry Climate Club,” aimed at tackling the global climate crisis through innovative international cooperation by leveraging existing momentum from policies like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The club would bring together countries willing to apply carbon pricing to emissions-intensive industries like steel, cement, and aluminum, coupled with border tariffs to discourage free-riding by non-members. By creating both incentives (like market access) and penalties (like tariffs), the approach aims to overcome barriers to collective action on climate change.