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    A delicate dance

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    In early 2022, economist Catherine Wolfram was at her desk in the U.S. Treasury building. She could see the east wing of the White House, just steps away.

    Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and Wolfram was thinking about Russia, oil, and sanctions. She and her colleagues had been tasked with figuring out how to restrict the revenues that Russia was using to fuel its brutal war while keeping Russian oil available and affordable to the countries that depended on it.

    Now the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at MIT, Wolfram was on leave from academia to serve as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics.

    Working for Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Wolfram and her colleagues developed dozens of models and forecasts and projections. It struck her, she said later, that “huge decisions [affecting the global economy] would be made on the basis of spreadsheets that I was helping create.” Wolfram composed a memo to the Biden administration and hoped her projections would pan out the way she believed they would.

    Tackling conundrums that weigh competing, sometimes contradictory, interests has defined much of Wolfram’s career.

    Wolfram specializes in the economics of energy markets. She looks at ways to decarbonize global energy systems while recognizing that energy drives economic development, especially in the developing world.

    “The way we’re currently making energy is contributing to climate change. There’s a delicate dance we have to do to make sure that we treat this important industry carefully, but also transform it rapidly to a cleaner, decarbonized system,” she says.

    Economists as influencers

    While Wolfram was growing up in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, her father was a law professor and her mother taught English as a second language. Her mother helped spawn Wolfram’s interest in other cultures and her love of travel, but it was an experience closer to home that sparked her awareness of the effect of human activities on the state of the planet.

    Minnesota’s nickname is “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Wolfram remembers swimming in a nearby lake sometimes covered by a thick sludge of algae. “Thinking back on it, it must’ve had to do with fertilizer runoff,” she says. “That was probably the first thing that made me think about the environment and policy.”

    In high school, Wolfram liked “the fact that you could use math to understand the world. I also was interested in the types of questions about human behavior that economists were thinking about.

    “I definitely think economics is good at sussing out how different actors are likely to react to a particular policy and then designing policies with that in mind.”

    After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1989, Wolfram worked with a Massachusetts agency that governed rate hikes for utilities. Seeing its reliance on research, she says, illuminated the role academics could play in policy setting. It made her think she could make a difference from within academia.

    While pursuing a PhD in economics from MIT, Wolfram counted Paul L. Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and former director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, among her mentors and influencers.

    After spending 1996 to 2000 as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard, she joined the faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

    At Berkeley, it struck Wolfram that while she labored over ways to marginally boost the energy efficiency of U.S. power plants, the economies of China and India were growing rapidly, with a corresponding growth in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. “It hit home that to understand the climate issue, I needed to understand energy demand in the developing world,” she says.

    The problem was that the developing world didn’t always offer up the kind of neatly packaged, comprehensive data economists relied on. She wondered if, by relying on readily accessible data, the field was looking under the lamppost — while losing sight of what the rest of the street looked like.

    To make up for a lack of available data on the state of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, Wolfram developed and administered surveys to individual, remote rural households using on-the-ground field teams.

    Her results suggested that in the world’s poorest countries, the challenges involved in expanding the grid in rural areas should be weighed against potentially greater economic and social returns on investments in the transportation, education, or health sectors.

    Taking the lead

    Within months of Wolfram’s memo to the Biden administration, leaders of the intergovernmental political forum Group of Seven (G7) agreed to the price cap. Tankers from coalition countries would only transport Russian crude sold at or below the price cap level, initially set at $60 per barrel.

    “A price cap was not something that had ever been done before,” Wolfram says. “In some ways, we were making it up out of whole cloth. It was exciting to see that I wrote one of the original memos about it, and then literally three-and-a-half months later, the G7 was making an announcement.

    “As economists and as policymakers, we must set the parameters and get the incentives right. The price cap was basically asking developing countries to buy cheap oil, which was consistent with their incentives.”

    In May 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury reported that despite widespread initial skepticism about the price cap, market participants and geopolitical analysts believe it is accomplishing its goals of restricting Russia’s oil revenues while maintaining the supply of Russian oil and keeping energy costs in check for consumers and businesses around the world.

    Wolfram held the U.S. Treasury post from March 2021 to October 2022 while on leave from UC Berkeley. In July 2023, she joined MIT Sloan School of Management partly to be geographically closer to the policymakers of the nation’s capital. She’s also excited about the work taking place elsewhere at the Institute to stay ahead of climate change.

    Her time in D.C. was eye-opening, particularly in terms of the leadership power of the United States. She worries that the United States is falling prey to “lost opportunities” in terms of addressing climate change. “We were showing real leadership on the price cap, and if we could only do that on climate, I think we could make faster inroads on a global agreement,” she says.

    Now focused on structuring global agreements in energy policy among developed and developing countries, she’s considering how the United States can take advantage of its position as a world leader. “We need to be thinking about how what we do in the U.S. affects the rest of the world from a climate perspective. We can’t go it alone.

    “The U.S. needs to be more aligned with the European Union, Canada, and Japan to try to find areas where we’re taking a common approach to addressing climate change,” she says. She will touch on some of those areas in the class she will teach in spring 2024 titled “Climate and Energy in the Global Economy,” offered through MIT Sloan.

    Looking ahead, she says, “I’m a techno optimist. I believe in human innovation. I’m optimistic that we’ll find ways to live with climate change and, hopefully, ways to minimize it.”

    This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      Responding to Ukraine’s “ocean of suffering”

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      Within 72 hours of the first Russian missiles striking Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, Ian Miller SM ’19 boarded a flight for Poland.

      Later, he’d say he felt motivated by Kyiv’s “tragic ocean of suffering” and Ukrainian President Zelensky’s pleas for help. But he arrived with little notion of what to do.

      As he’d anticipated, his hotel in Rzeszów turned out to be a hub for aid workers and journalists. Miller was on his laptop, using the lobby Wi-Fi to work remotely as an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) project manager, when he overheard a reporter interviewing a Finnish man about his efforts to get bulletproof vests and helmets to the front lines.

      Miller soon found himself loading supplies onto trains that had brought huge numbers of refugees — mostly women, children, and the elderly — to the station in Rzeszów. The trains ran back at night, their empty seats filled with medical supplies, generators, and baby food, their lights dimmed to reduce the chances of attack.

      In April 2022, Miller and volunteers from a half-dozen countries planned and drove a convoy of trucks packed with tourniquets, bandages, and bulletproof vests across the border, arriving at the site of the Bucha massacre soon after the Russians retreated.

      Miller peered into a mass grave. “They were still excavating it, and those weren’t soldiers, you know?” he says. “I try to avoid looking at things like that too often, because it doesn’t help us save lives to be horrified all the time.” He downplays any potential danger to himself, telling his family he’s safer where he is than in parts of the United States.

      Soon after his first trip across the border, Miller convinced his former MIT roommate, Evan Platt SM ’20, to come help. “Just for a week,” he told Platt.

      Inspired by energy

      Miller and Platt met in 2008 in Washington, where Platt was interning at the White House and Miller was about to start his senior year at Georgetown University.

      Miller majored in government, but his interest in energy policy and technology grew during the years after graduation he spent teaching science to primary and secondary school students in New York, where he’d grown up; in Boston; and in Kampala, Uganda. “Some of the most fun, inspiring, engaging lessons and modules I did with the kids were focused on energy,” he recalls.

      While pursuing an MIT master of science in chemical engineering from 2016 to 2018, he started researching photovoltaics and wind power. He held leadership positions with the MIT Energy Conference and the MIT Energy Club.

      After joining MITEI, Miller worked on electric vehicles (EVs), EV charging patterns, and other applications. He became project manager and research specialist for the Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), which models the levels of greenhouse gas emissions from multiple energy sectors in future scenarios.

      Miller and Platt reconnected and shared an apartment for three years. Platt studied systems design and management through a joint MIT School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management program, then stayed on to work for the MIT Technology Licensing Office.

      Platt left MIT to pursue other interests in 2020. The next time the two would see each other would be in Poland.

      “It’s not easy living and working in an active combat zone,” Platt says. “There is nobody on Earth I would rather be navigating this environment with than Ian.”

      Navigating the last mile

      In Rzeszów and Ukraine, Miller and U.S. Air Force veteran Mark Lindquist oversaw fulfillment for the new team. With the help of Google Translate, their phones lit up with encrypted texts to and from Polish customs agents and Ukrainian warehouse operators.

      Platt and two Ukrainian team members took the lead on a needs analysis of what was most in demand at the front. Another team member led procurement. Their efforts crystallized in the creation of Zero Line, a tax-exempt nonprofit that works closely with the Ukrainian government at the front line (a.k.a. “the zero line”).

      With Platt on board, “we got more rigorous and quantitative in terms of lives-saved-per-dollar,” Miller says. A hundred dollars buys four tourniquets. A thousand dollars adds crude steel armor to a Jeep. Two thousand dollars provides a small observation drone or a satellite phone, equipment that locates Russian artillery and detects Russian attacks.

      “Russian artillery shells are the No. 1 killer of Ukrainians, causing around 80 percent of casualties,” he says. “Tourniquets save people injured by Russian shells, vehicles help evacuate them, and communications equipment prevents deadly injuries from occurring in the first place.”

      Miller’s skills in transportation and power system modeling, developed at MITEI under Principal Research Scientist Emre Gençer, helped the team transport more than 150 used vehicles — Nissan Pathfinders and vans for moving civilians away from the front, Ford pickups for transporting anti-missile defense systems — and hundreds of batteries, generators, drones, bulletproof vests, and helmets to the front through nightmarish logistical bottlenecks.

      Typically, supplies from the United States, Asia, and elsewhere in Europe move through Gdansk and Warsaw, then proceed via train or vehicle to warehouses in Lviv, around 70 kilometers east of the border. Next is the seven-hour trip to Kyiv or the 12-hour drive to Dnipro (the current southern edge of the safe “green zone”) and the final 200 kilometers to the front. Here, says Miller, drivers with training and protective gear, often members of the Ukrainian military, take vehicles and supplies to front-line end users.

      “From day one, we asked our Ukrainian members and partners for introductions, and we’re constantly looking for more,” Miller says. “When our vehicles reach the front lines, Evan’s team always does interviews about needs, and what’s working, what’s not. What’s saving the most lives.”

      “From my early days with Ian, it’s clear he was always looking for ways to help people. Connections were really important to him,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong. “When war broke out, he found the call to answer human need irresistible. I think many of us think of doing that, but we get bogged down in the mechanics of everyday life. He just picked up and went.

      “Ian is just a terrific person and a great role model,” Armstrong says.

      Accelerating peace

      From the time Miller arrived in late February through October 2022, he continued working remotely for MITEI. He now works full time as co-director of Zero Line. For the foreseeable future, Miller will remain in Ukraine and Poland.

      He wants to see Ukrainians “follow in the happy, free, prospering footsteps of other ex-Soviet states, like the Baltics,” he says. He’d like to see the supply-chain innovations he and Platt achieved applied to humanitarian crises elsewhere.

      To date, Zero Line has raised more than $5 million in donations and delivered hundreds of tons of high-impact aid. “A key part of our approach has always been to support Ukrainians who excel in saving lives,” Miller says. To that end, the group works with Ukrainian software programmers and military units to create digital maps and processes to replace paper maps and operations “reminiscent of World War II,” Platt says. “Modernizing the intelligence infrastructure to facilitate better military operations is an important part of how a smaller military can beat a larger, more powerful military.”

      The fact that energy underlies so many aspects of the war is never far from Miller’s mind. Russia cut off energy supplies to Europe, then targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. On one hand, he understands that billions of people in developing countries such as India need and deserve affordable energy. On the other hand, he says, oil and gas purchases by those countries are directly funding Russia’s war machine.

      “Everyone wants cheap renewables and we’re getting there, but it’s taking time. Lowering the costs of renewables and energy storage and supporting nascent commercial fusion — that’s a very important focus of MITEI. In the long run, that’ll help us reach a more peaceful world, without a doubt.”

      Work at MITEI and at Zero Line, Miller says, “truly could accelerate peace.” More

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      Energy, war, and the crisis in Ukraine

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      Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having a global impact on many areas of the world today, affecting the balance of power among states and creating a contest between democratic and authoritarian alliances. It is also having a major impact on the global energy supply. European states have scrambled to reorient their consumption away from Russian natural gas, while Russia has used its energy assets as political leverage while finding new economic partners.

      In short, there is also a battle over energy surrounding the invasion, as a panel of experts analyzed at a public MIT event on Friday. The online discussion, “Energy As a Weapon of War,” was the latest Starr Forum, MIT’s prominent event series on foreign policy and international relations.

      The forum’s two featured speakers both discussed energy issues as well as the larger course of the war. Margarita Balmaceda, a professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, listed three key aspects of the energy issue implicated in the invasion.

      In the first place, she noted, European reliance on Russian natural gas is a long-term issue that also existed with the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, but is only now being managed differently.

      “If we look at the case of Germany … you can see that the temptation of this reliance in particular on Russian natural gas was not simply something that you could ascribe to one or two corrupt politicians,” said Balmaceda, author of the book “Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union.” Instead, she said, “it’s something that went to all levels of economic life,” including industrial consumers of natural gas, regional governments, and other stakeholders. 

      Secondly, Balmaceda observed, many core manufacturing industries, especially in Germany, have been particularly dependent on Russian energy, making the need for alternatives something that has direct effects in key production sectors.

      “In my view, the real story, and the story we have to pay much more attention to, has to do with … industrial users of natural gas,” Balmaceda said. In fact, she noted, gas consumption is a major part of the production cycle in Europe’s chemical, cement, steel, and paper industries, supporting about 8 million jobs.

      Finally, Balmaceda observed, European boycotts of Russian energy may have temporarily stymied Russia, but the regime has subsequently found new markets in China, India, and elsewhere.

      “It’s very important to understand that this story does not end in the European Union and North America, and if we don’t deal with the real energy concerns of global South countries, we will not get very far in trying to reduce Russia’s energy power moving forward,” she said.

      Constanze Steinmuller, director and Fritz Stern Chair of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, offered some political context as well as her own perspective on paths forward in the war.

      While policymakers in Europe frequently praise the response of the Biden administration in the U.S., in support of Ukraine, “It’s also remarkable how steadfast the European response has been,” Steinmuller said. She added, “It’s something I was very worried about.” She also praised the German government for “decoupling German dependence from Russian gas and oil imports in ways I honestly would not have thought possible.”

      While the alliance supporting Ukraine has been valuable, Steinmuller said, she believes the U.S. and Europe need to give Ukraine even more backing in terms of weaponry in particular. “It is unclear, at this point still, whether Ukraine will have the means to retain full control over its territory.”

      Meanwhile, Russia’s relationship with China, she added, is profoundly consequential for the long-term trajectory of the war. So far, China has been nominally pledging broad support of Russia while publicly de-escalating the nuclear rhetoric arising from the war. However, Steinmuller added, if China decides to “actively support” Russia militarily, “That would be, I think, the worst game-changer of all, and one that … would be the single greatest challenge that I can envision to our ability to help Ukraine win, and to maintain our own security in Europe.”

      The Starr Forum is organized by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS). Friday’s event was co-sponsored by MIT’s Security Studies Program and the MIT-Eurasia program, in addition to CIS.

      The event’s moderators were Elizabeth Wood, a professor of history at MIT, author of the 2016 book “Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine,” and co-director of the MISTI MIT-Eurasia Program; and Carol Saivetz, a senior advisor in MIT’s Security Studies Program and expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy. Wood and Saivetz have helped host a series of Starr Forum events over the last year scrutinizing several aspects of Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s defense.  

      Understanding the role of energy in the war “is obviously of critical importance today,” Wood said in her opening remarks. That includes, she noted, “How energy is being used by Russia as a tool of aggression, how Ukraine is suffering from attacks upon its critical infrastructure, and how the alliance of European [states] and the U.S. is responding.” 

      In response to audience questions, the scholars outlined multiple scenarios in which the war could end, either on more favorable terms for Ukraine or in ways that strengthen Russia. One audience member also queried about the extent to which the current war could also be thought of as a “carbon war, or climate war,” in which a move toward clean energy also lessens global dependence on large gas and oil suppliers, such as Russia.

      In response, Balmaceda noted that the ongoing infrastructure development in Ukraine might, in theory, leave it with no choice but to modernize its energy infrastructure (though its own orientation toward fossil fuels represents just a small portion of global demand). Steinmuller added that “Ukraine will need much more than just to reorient its energy [demand]. … It will have to change its role in the global economy,” given its own industrial reliance on coal and other fossil fuels.

      Overall, Balmaceda added, “Regardless of whether Russia wins this conflict or loses, the rottenness within Russia is deep enough to be bad news for all of us for a long time.” For her part, Steinmuller underscored again how vital increased alliance support would be.

      “We should show that we are willing and able to defend not just a country that has been attacked by a great power, but willing to defend ourselves,” Steinmuller said. Otherwise, she added, “If we didn’t do that, we would have set for all the world to see a precedent of giving in to blackmail, including nuclear blackmail, and allowing this to happen without us being willing to see the defense of Ukraine through to the end.” More