Over the summer, I worked for the Climate Knowledge Initiative (CKI), within the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change, on the biofuels team, conducting extensive research into the biofuels industry with a focus on current technological, investment, and policy landscapes. I worked closely with my team lead to create graphics and informational slides, condensing very technical reports and articles into digestible content geared towards consumption from business and policy leaders. This research work contributed to the CKI’s overall mission of providing concise and pointed information to those within the agency to effect change in the realm of decarbonization.

The transportation industry plays a major role in the carbon emissions output of many developed countries such as the US and European Union, and biofuels play a critical role in reaching net zero emissions goals in both road and aviation transport. We also collaborated heavily with other teams working on energy storage and sustainable proteins to create a more accurate Mekko chart of global emissions breakdowns, which provides a more accurate outlook on the future of climate mitigation.

As an undergraduate student studying economics, political science, and sustainable development, all three of the subjects I am dedicated to allowed me to excel in my position this summer. A basic knowledge of and the current political/policy atmosphere complemented my learnings of the biofuels industry. For example, having researched the Inflation Reduction Act for a previous class helped me better understand the role the biofuels played in the overall emissions reduction scheme that the US has in place.

The undergraduate sustainable development program has also been an excellent resource, as I am looking forward to taking classes such as Energy Law, that directly relate to the topics that I have been able to research throughout my summer with the CKI. In general, the research and writing skills I have been able to hone through my first year at Columbia have been helpful during this summer and I hope to apply my learnings to the classroom this semester.

The most difficult challenge I faced this summer was working with master’s students who had significantly more work and general life experience than I did. Being the youngest member on the team, I often felt that I lacked important skills such as a deftness with PowerPoint and conducting quantitative analyses/modeling that many others had, but I used this challenge to my advantage and learned as much as I could from those around me. The efficiency at which my team lead and other co-workers worked was extremely impressive and gave me a glimpse into what the professional world would look like beyond my undergraduate years, and I am very grateful for their mentorship and patience with me as I took my time to figure out all of the skills and steps they had laid out for me. Another challenge was being able to synthesize the information I had gathered into a clear and easily digestible narrative, which I worked through with my team to perfect.

One key takeaway I had was being realistic about the technologies that we are investing in and understanding their true limits, which then often reveal their strengths. For example, biofuels are far from the perfect solution to the climate crisis as a whole — the transportation sector itself is not among the top three sources of emissions globally, and within that, only a select portion of road and aviation emissions can actually be targeted by biofuels. However, this does not mean that biofuels won’t have a significant impact in reducing our carbon footprint and that it’s not worth researching or investing in; our business and policy leaders just need to be smart about which technologies they focus on. In this way, I learned much about the efficacy of certain policy and investment initiatives, as well as technologies themselves. I also took away an enjoyment of working with the climate and the business/government-related aspects of it, and hope to continue this work throughout my time at Columbia and beyond.