Amy Myers Jaffe

Amy Myers Jaffe is one of the world’s most authoritative voices on energy geopolitics, climate risk, and the technological transformation of global energy systems. She serves as Director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab and Research Professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, where she teaches graduate-level courses on global climate finance, energy justice, and energy policy. She is also co-chair of the Women in Energy Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a faculty research affiliate at the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University.

Sustainability speaker Amy Myers Jaffe has spent three decades at the intersection of energy markets, national security, and institutional strategy. She served as Director for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, Executive Director for Energy and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis, and founding director of the Energy Forum at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy — one of the most influential energy policy centers in the United States. She holds a BA from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies and Arabic, a credential that has grounded her analytical work on oil geopolitics in rare regional depth.

Her research today focuses on four interconnected frontiers: the role of digital technology and artificial intelligence in reshaping energy infrastructure; energy and social justice in the United States; the financial and security risks of climate change for institutional investors and sovereign governments; and the evolving geopolitics of global energy supply. She regularly testifies before the U.S. Congress on national security and energy policy, and has briefed the National Intelligence Council, the European Central Bank, and numerous state governments. She is a frequent contributor to the Aspen Institute Congressional program and has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Net Zero Transition.

Energy’s Digital Future and the AI-Grid Nexus

Jaffe is the author of Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Columbia University Press, 2021), which makes the case that the United States must embrace the convergence of automation, AI, and big data to secure its energy and economic future in a post-oil era. The book received wide recognition across the defense, finance, and energy policy communities. She is also co-author of Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold (Cambridge University Press) and Natural Gas and Geopolitics (Cambridge University Press), among other major works. She holds a career prize in energy economics from the U.S. Association for Energy Economics and served as the organization’s President in 2020.

As a speaker, Amy Myers Jaffe brings a rare combination of academic rigor, policy experience, and strategic foresight to any stage. Her keynotes connect the macro — geopolitical shifts, AI’s demand on power grids, the pace of the energy transition — to the decisions that executives, investors, and policymakers must make today. Audiences consistently value her ability to cut through ideological noise and deliver clear, evidence-based frameworks for navigating one of the most consequential and volatile sectors in the global economy.