Catherine
Wolfram, a leading energy economist, has joined the Department of
Treasury as the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for
Climate and Energy Economics in the Office of Economic Policy.
Wolfram is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done real-world research into the outcomes of policies such as rural electrification and weatherization assistance.
In 2019, Wolfram wrote sympathetically about the Green New Deal:
“In general, though, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that the US government needs to do a lot more to address climate change, and the GND’s first steps aren’t totally whacky from an economics perspective. I hope Ocasio-Cortez and others succeed in mobilizing interest and putting climate change back in the political spotlight.”
She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1989 and her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1996, and taught at Harvard before joining Berkeley.
From 2009 to 2018, she was the director of Berkeley’s Energy Institute, a utility and non-profit-funded research initiative.
In 2020, she became visiting faculty at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, an initiative heavily financed by the oil and gas industry.