Electra Steel is Sandeep Nijhawan’s brainchild to decarbonize the process of making steel by creating green iron ore. The incumbent steel industry is a big offender when it comes to greenhouse gases, emitting about 2 tonnes of CO2 produced for every tonne of steel, and a major part of emissions-producing steel production hinges on the processing of iron, so Electra’s strategy is to address this part. This case discusses the steel manufacturing industry and the process of converting iron to steel as well as highlights sources of emissions.
Gernot Wagner
- Senior Lecturer in Discipline of Economics in the Faculty of Business
- Economics Division
- Faculty Director, Climate Knowledge Initiative
- Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change
- Faculty Fellow
- CESifo
- Board Member
- CarbonPlan
- Columnist
- Project Syndicate
- Senior Fellow
- Jain Family Institute
- Areas of Expertise
- Climate
- Contact
- Office: 392 Kravis
- Phone: (212) 8534096
- E-mail: [email protected]
* It's pronounced like "juggernaut" without the "jug."
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy.
Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books: Geoengineering: the Gamble, published by Polity (2021); Stadt, Land, Klima (“City, Country, Climate”), published, in German, by Brandstätter Verlag (2021); Climate Shock, joint with Harvard's Martin Weitzman and published by Princeton (2015), among others, a Top 15 FT McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015, and Austria’s Natural Science Book of the Year 2017; and But will the planet notice?, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar Strauss & Giroux (2011).
Prior to joining Columbia as senior lecturer and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU, Harvard, and Columbia. He was the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2016 – 2019), and served as economist at the Environmental Defense Fund (2008 – 2016), most recently as lead senior economist (2014 – 2016) and member of its Leadership Council (2015 – 2016). Before EDF, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Düsseldorf and New York and wrote for the Financial Times leader writer team in London. He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, and is a CEPR research fellow, a CESifo Research Network Fellow, a Faculty Affiliate at the Columbia Center for Environmental Economics and Policy, a Member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a Coordinating Lead Author of the Austrian Panel on Climate Change, and he serves on the board of CarbonPlan.org.
Born and raised in Amstetten, Austria, Gernot graduated from high school in his hometown before moving to the U.S. for college. He holds a joint bachelor’s magna cum laude with highest honors in environmental science, public policy, and economics, and a master’s and Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard, as well as a master’s in economics from Stanford.
Gernot lives in New York City with his wife, Siri Nippita, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health and the chief of the family planning division as well as the director of Reproductive Choice at Bellevue Hospital, and their two young children.
See my preoccupations, follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn (skip Twitter, at least for now), sign up for email updates, or find me online at: Columbia Business School | Google Scholar | Leigh Speakers Bureau | Project Syndicate | New York Times | Washington Post | LinkedIn | Amazon | Bloomberg Green | CESifo and the always trustworthy Wikipedia.
- Education
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- Joined CBS
- 2022
Featured Research
Electra: Decarbonizing Steelmaking Through Carbon-free Iron
Carbon Dioxide as a Risky Asset
- Authors
- Date
- Forthcoming
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Climatic Change
We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications.
Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system
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- Date
- August 24, 2021
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Climate scientists have long emphasized the importance of climate tipping points like thawing permafrost, ice sheet disintegration, and changes in atmospheric circulation. Yet, save for a few fragmented studies, climate economics has either ignored them or represented them in highly stylized ways. We provide unified estimates of the economic impacts of all eight climate tipping points covered in the economic literature so far using a meta-analytic integrated assessment model (IAM) with a modular structure.
Declining CO₂ price paths
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- October 1, 2019
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Journal Article
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- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Pricing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions involves making tradeoffs between consumption today and unknown damages in the (distant) future. While decision making under risk and uncertainty is the forte of financial economics, important insights from pricing financial assets do not typically inform standard climate–economy models. Here, we introduce EZ-Climate, a simple recursive dynamic asset pricing model that allows for a calibration of the carbon dioxide (CO2) price path based on probabilistic assumptions around climate damages.
Climate Shock
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Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman
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- April 19, 2016
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- Princeton University Press
Top 15 Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of 2015
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- Case ID
- 240305
Stripe Climate: Creating a Market for Carbon Removal
How can payments company Stripe move forward the carbon removal sustainability effort through advance market commitments and what are its next steps on its climate initiative?
- Case ID
- 240303
Electra: Decarbonizing Steelmaking Through Carbon-free Iron
- Case ID
- 230306
Decarbonizing voestalpine High-Performance Metal
Should an incumbent metal manufacturing company make the change to green steel and how should it address its business model to be successful in its move to carbon neutrality?
- Case ID
- 230307
Clean Core Thorium Energy and the Role of Nuclear Power in the Low-carbon Transition
Is nuclear power an attractive alternative for the production of cleaner, low-carbon energy?
- Case ID
- 220310
The Cost to Achieve Net-Zero
What are the factors that must be considered in the global transition to a net-zero carbon emission economy and who should pay for it?