Noah Kaufman
Senior Research Scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs; Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Dr. Noah Kaufman joined the Columbia SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) as a research scholar in January 2018. Noah works on climate and clean energy policies and directs CGEP’s Carbon Tax Research Initiative.
At World Resource Institute, Noah led projects on carbon pricing, the economic impacts of climate policies, and long-term decarbonization strategies. Under President Obama, he served as the Deputy Associate Director of Energy & Climate Change at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Previously, he was a Senior Consultant in the Environment Practice of NERA Economic Consulting.
Noah received his BS in economics, cum laude, from Duke University, and his PhD and MS in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where his dissertation examined optimal policy responses to climate change.
He has published peer-reviewed journal articles on the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions and the role of risk aversion in environmental policy evaluations, among other topics.
Education
- PhD in economics, University of Texas at Austin
- MS in economics, University of Texas at Austin
- BS in economics, cum laude, Duke University
In The Media
Noah Kaufman, senior scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, unpacks what Trump has lost by dismantling Biden’s energy resilience strategy.
Models can predict catastrophic or modest damages from climate change, but not which of these futures is coming, writes Noah Kaufman.
Noah Kaufman, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who worked in the Biden White House, believes studying specific questions — like how to decarbonize while keeping electricity affordable — is more useful than projecting macroeconomic impacts decades down the road. “There are just a lot of examples in the world where we do recognize that there are large risks, but we don’t pretend we can optimize our response to them,” Mr. Kaufman said. “We just try to avoid them in a reasonable way.”
Noah Kaufman, a former adviser to Barack Obama and Joe Biden who is now at Columbia University, argues that climate policy in America has a “path dependency problem.”
"I don't think subsidizing electricity just as a general matter necessarily makes sense," says Noah Kaufman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who served as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.