Steven Stoft is an economist with a background in physics, math, and astronomy. Between graduate astronomy and economics, he taught middle school and high school science, and hired and trained disadvantaged youth as “explainers” for San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum.

In parallel with his technical side, Stoft has maintained a keen interest in politics since the sixth grade, which has guided his activism and is now setting his agenda.

Late in his economics career, he began researching climate change, which eventually led to Global Carbon Pricing (MIT press, 2017). He is still actively engaged in climate-cooperation research, which has included behavior experiments conducted at the University of Cologne. Recently however, his life-long, somewhat-activist interest in politics has resulted in a pair of books on the American left’s contributions to the new populism and to polarization.

Although his dissertation under George Akerlof at UC Berkeley challenged the neoclassical view that unemployment is optimal, after teaching at Boston University and UC Santa Cruz, his science background led him to energy-efficiency economic research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Migrating to the UC Energy Institute, he studied the new markets for wholesale electric power, and then spent a year at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), after which he became a consultant to the newly formed power markets, including PJM (serving 65 million people), ISO New England (serving six states), the California ISO, and the Alberta Electric System Operator.

After leaving FERC, Steven wrote what became the most popular text in that field — Power System Economics (Wiley/IEEE, 2002) — which was translated into Chinese, Russian, and Farsi. This led to his role as the expert economic witness in California’s suit to recover some of the $40 billion it spent on double-priced power futures while trying to extricate itself from its 2000−’01 electricity-market crisis.

In 2011, Steven accepted a consultancy with the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, partly in the hope of collaborating with the renowned physicist David MacKay, its Chief Scientific Adviser. This venture succeeded after Steven, as a member of the editorial board of the journal Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy, organized a “symposium” of papers, which included Nobel economists Joe Stiglitz and Jean Tirole. The collaboration with MacKay and two other colleagues led to a collection of papers by authors which also includes William Nordhaus, the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for his work on climate economics.