Pinar Batur: Using Regulating Carbon Emissions in Killing Fog: Coal, Energy and Pollution at Vassar College

As the course outline indicates, the course began with two catalytic events: in December 1952, a deadly mix of fog and coal soot that lasted for five days killed thousands of Londoners. This event, one of the worst environmental disasters in history, raised awareness of the pollution associated with coal usage, and coal's deep integration into the economy and politics worldwide. Yet, more than half a century later, the fight continues to regulate coal power's impact in the United States and elsewhere. As the representatives of 195 countries met for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, coal soot continued to hang in the air. The first day of the conference was marked by record levels of air pollution in Beijing, while in India coal power plants have contributed to one of the worst health crises, causing about 100,000 deaths and about 20 million cases of asthma in India. This course, connecting science and policy making, examined the science, economics and politics of coal usage in the United States and globally, and explored movements against the hegemony of coal in the era of the Anthropocene.

After the introductory exploration of the historical, economic and political background of coal usage, and after studying the chemistry of coal with a guest speaker from the Chemistry department, we reached the core of the module, consisting of three sections: "Anthropogenic Climate Change," "The Social Cost of Carbon," and "Carbon Emission Policies in the United States."

Even though it's a very useful overview, some of my students found the section on "Anthropogenic Climate Change" too long. They were more interested in IPCC's assessment of climate change from a global level, instead of the focus on the United States. I had to add more global-local connections to highlight some of the controversial issues, such as responsibility, incentives to act/react and global energy markets, including contemporary discussion regarding Global Carbon Debt, dealing with refugees, mitigation funds and culpability. For example, by focusing on Kivalina, Alaska, we explored environmental justice issues, including the "Polluter Pays Principle" (PPP), the "Ability to Pay Principle" (APP), and the "Beneficiary Pays Principle" (BPP). Briefly, the PPP assigns financial responsibility to countries on the basis of their historical emissions; the APP assigns responsibility to countries based on their ability to pay and average per capita income; and the BPP assigns responsibility to countries based on the ratio of benefits accrued to harm inflicted on other populations through the country's historical use of fossil fuels. In my assessment, these discussions helped the class to move to our second section, "The Social Cost of Carbon."

The "Social Cost of Carbon" section is designed to introduce students to an important body of material, namely, the tenets of microeconomics that underpin popular discourse on climate change. The notion of a Social Cost of Carbon has been popularized for its ability to express a simple model of the causes and effects of climate change and to quantify the damages of climate change, along with expected costs of remediation. It is significant that climate change has been framed in this economic sense, as much public policy and debate has been simplified to the point of asking, what will be the damages of climate change, and at what point is abatement worth the cost? Indeed, expressing the cost of damages of climate change in a single number is as compelling as it is simplistic. This economic mindset—that an optimal decision exists to be made at the moment when the benefits of abating climate change are maximized relative to costs—has doubtlessly allowed a broad audience to comprehend and fathom the problem of climate change. But simultaneously, it introduces many assumptions that are frequently ignored by practitioners in the discourse.

As designed, the "Social Cost of Carbon" section of the course introduces students to the economic intuition of climate change using an abstraction of microeconomics and through hands-on experimentation with Bill Nordhaus's DICE model (a highly parameterized economic model of climate change). With these materials, students grappled with the basic reasoning behind relationships between the natural environment, economic growth, emissions, and abatement, while seeing how changes they make to parameters in DICE affect the system.

For the third section of our module, "Carbon Emission Policies in the United States," my colleagues, Professors Curt Gervich of SUNY-Plattsburgh, Eric Leibensperger, SUNY-Plattsburgh and Guatham Sethi of Bard College joined us. This is the section where students began to grasp the challenges of policy making. Our discussion of the EPA's role in regulating carbon emissions and the Clean Power Plan became a way to go back to the example of Kivalina, Alaska, to debate environmental justice issues including the "Polluter Pays Principle" (PPP), the "Ability to Pay Principle" (APP), and the "Beneficiary Pays Principle" (BPP). We explored what would be the impact of assigning financial responsibility to countries on the basis of their historical emissions; or responsibility to countries based on their ability to pay and average per capita income; or responsibility to countries based on the ratio of benefits accrued to harm inflicted on other populations through the country's historical use of fossil fuels. We also discussed China and India, in terms of their position in the coal economy. Furthermore, we explored how these decisions influence the lives of coal miners in the United States.

My biggest challenge as a professor of social theory was the webDICE model. The InTeGrate materials promote the DICE model as a tool for making climate policy, but do not adequately assign time to equip students to understand how the model itself works. After introducing the notion of DICE's objective function, I proceeded to diagram how the model itself is constructed. Breaking down the model in this way is the clearest way for students to comprehend why the parameter choices they make result in particular outcomes. Such reasoning is central to understanding how to use the model to inform policy decisions; without it, students are merely guessing how choices they make will affect outcomes. Furthermore, detailing how the model itself is constructed equips students to be mindful of its implicit assumptions and to be aware of situations in which DICE's output will be of limited value or potentially misleading. The students were engaged by a discussion of what the DICE model overlooks or leaves out, and energized by thinking about ways it might be improved. This level of thinking is a sign that students are learning to think about climate change as a systems problem, characterized by interrelated variables and significant uncertainties. A goal of teaching this appreciation for interconnectivity, risk, and data sufficiency is an integral part of our curriculum and the students and practitioners are better able to use DICE and similar tools to make informed policy decisions, if they are aware of the assumptions and shortcomings of these methods. We need to add a section about these discussions to our module. The appeal of DICE and similar tools comes from their ability to explain the complex—the importance of teaching students to be informed users of these tools and insights should not be understated. Writing an Op-Ed piece regarding regulating carbon emissions was the highlight of the module, and it allowed students to debate the complexities of this issue in their own words.