Amy Myers Jaffe Speaker Profile

Leading Expert on Oil, Energy, and Sustainability

Amy Myers Jaffe is a leading expert on global energy policy, energy and sustainability, and geopolitical risk. She is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change. Prior to joining the Council On Foreign Relations, Jaffe was the executive director for Energy and Sustainability at the University of California Davis.

Energy Studies

Prior to joining UC Davis, Jaffe served as founding director of the Baker Institute Energy Forum (now called the Center for Energy Studies) and Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

Geopolitics

A frequent media commentator and former journalist, Jaffe’s research focuses on oil and natural gas geopolitics, corporate investment strategies in the energy sector, sustainability and energy, and energy economics.

Books

She was formerly senior editor and Middle East analyst for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. Jaffe is widely published, including as co-author of Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold with Mahmoud El-Gamal and co-editor of Natural Gas and Geopolitics From 1970 to 2040. Her latest book is Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security.

Keynote Speaker

As an energy consultant, Jaffe is a frequent keynote speaker at major energy industry and investment conferences and at board meetings of financial firms, energy companies and environmental NGOs.

Media

Jaffe is a widely quoted commentator on oil, energy policy, and sustainability in the international media appearing regularly on a variety of television and print media, including CNN, PBS News Hour, Fox, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist Magazine, Axios and Politico.

Publications

Her writings have been featured by the New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones International, and Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. She has a regular blog called Energy RealPolitik at the CFR.org and is a frequent contributor to the Gray Matters column at the Houston Chronicle.

Awards

Jaffe was awarded the Senior Fellow Award from the U.S. Association for Energy Economics in 2015 for her career contribution to the organization and to the field of energy economics. The Baker Institute Energy Forum, which she was the founding director for 17 years, received the prestigious Adelman-Frankel award for its unique and innovative contribution to the field of energy economics. Jaffe was honoree to Esquire’s 100 Best and Brightest Award for Contribution to Society in 2005 and Elle Magazine’s Women for the Environment (2006).

Oil and Inflation: Separating wheat from chaff (pun intended)

In past oil price shock cycles of the 2000s and 2010s, low interest rates effectively fueled oil price bubbles, supported by geopolitical tensions and a weakening US dollar. Those oil price bubbles created economic headwinds. While today’s oil market is also elevated by speculation amidst geopolitical backdrops, the situation is quite different from 2009 and 2014. The prospects of continued US Federal Reserve intervention to curb inflation makes today’s situation different than in these past oil shocks. But structural supply chain problems, emanating at least in part from Russia, China, and Ukraine, also mean that analogies to 1970s wage push stagflation is also a less than perfect analog. Amy Myers Jaffe talks about the geopolitics of inflation and the prospects for a soft landing through government interventions. Jaffe will discuss the possibility of a soft landing vs the potential for a new emerging market distressed cycle, driven by US rates, the strong dollar, high external debt, rising economic input costs and climate change and what each scenario would mean for future commodity prices.