Nathi Magubane
In February 2020, at a talk hosted by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Jen Wilcox, who at the time was a visiting scholar in the Kleinman Center, said “There’s no silver bullet to address the ever-pressing climate crisis.” It’s a phrase she’s come to embrace as her tagline in explaining her approach to tackling climate change.
The talk centered around her area of expertise, direct-air capture—essentially, pulling CO2 from air and storing it to reduce its deleterious effects on the environment—and she pointed to the pressing need to scale up “a portfolio of approaches” geared toward addressing the nearly 40 billion tons of emissions produced each year.
That September, Wilcox made her way to Penn to take up her role as the first faculty appointment as the Kleinman Center Distinguished Presidential Professor along with her primary appointment at the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Yet, just as she was getting settled in, she received a surprising email from the newly-elected Biden Administration transition team inviting her to interview for a position in Washington to serve as the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy.
“I thought it was spam,” she says with a chuckle, noting that it was for a role she didn’t fully understand and for an office that she didn’t know all that much about. After six interviews, Wilcox was offered the job and took a sabbatical from Penn. The new job, she explains presented an impactful opportunity to “advance the U.S.—and the world writ large—toward a pivotal shift in our climate change trajectory.”
She says her focus became scaling up solutions, developing mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence, and setting the country on a path to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In a conversation with Penn Today, Wilcox reflects on her time working in government and discusses her plans as she returns to academic life.