Global efforts to combat climate change face significant challenges, including declining interest in multilateralism, voter backlash against aggressive climate action and President Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.

The club would bring together countries willing to apply carbon pricing to emissions-intensive industries like steel, cement, and aluminum, coupled with border tariffs to discourage free-riding by non-members. By creating both incentives (like market access) and penalties (like tariffs), the approach aims to overcome barriers to collective action on climate change.

Catherine Wolfram is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Before leaving for government service, she was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard.

Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK. She is currently working on several projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on the impact of the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) on Mozambique, policy spillovers from the EU CBAM, border adjustments for methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, and the price cap on Russian oil.