David Sandalow is a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. He is also the inaugural fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy and director of the energy and environment concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He founded and directs the center’s US-China Program and is author of the Guide to Chinese Climate Policy. He teaches a one- to two-month short course each year as a distinguished visiting professor in the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University and is a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Sandalow chairs the ICEF Innovation Roadmap Project. In that capacity, he has led the development of roadmaps on low-carbon ammonia, biomass carbon removal and storage, industrial decarbonization, direct air capture, and carbon dioxide utilization, among other topics.
Previously, Sandalow served at the US Department of Energy, where he was under secretary of energy (acting) and assistant secretary for policy and international affairs. Prior to serving at the Department of Energy, Sandalow was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has served as assistant secretary of state for oceans, environment, and science, and as a senior director on the National Security Council staff.
Sandalow writes and speaks widely on energy and climate policy. In addition to the publications mentioned above, he has written extensively for Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, with titles including “Food and Climate InfoGuide,” “Leveraging State Funds for Clean Energy,” “Green Stimulus Proposals in China and the United States,” “China and the Oil Price War,” “Decarbonizing Space Heating With Air Source Heat Pumps,” “Electric Vehicle Charging in China and the United States,” “A Natural Gas Giant Awakens,” “The Geopolitics of Renewable Energy,” “Financing Solar and Wind Power: Lessons from Oil and Gas,” and “The History and Future of the Clean Energy Ministerial.”
His recent writings also include “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Food System: Building the Evidence Base” (Environmental Research Letters, 2021), “Finding and Fixing Food System Emissions: The Double Helix of Science and Policy” (Environmental Research Letters, 2021), “China’s Response to Climate Change: A Study in Contrasts” (Asia Society Policy Institute, 2020). Other works include Plug-In Electric Vehicles: What Role for Washington? (2009), “Overcoming Obstacles to US-China Cooperation on Climate Change” (Brookings, 2009), and Freedom from Oil (2007).
Sandalow serves as a director of Enagás and Fermata Energy, and as senior advisor to Boston Cosulting Group. He is a member of the Zayed Sustainability Prize Selection Committee, Electric Drive Transport Association’s “Hall of Fame,” and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sandalow is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and Yale College.