Through a combination of lectures, cases, and class discussions this subject examines the economic and political conflict between transportation and the environment. It investigates the role of government regulation, green business and transportation policy as facilitators of economic development and environmental sustainability. It analyzes a variety of international policy problems including government-business relations; the role of interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and the public and media in the regulation of the automobile; sustainable development; global warming; the politics of risk and siting of transport facilities; environmental justice; equity; and transportation and public health in the urban metropolis. It provides students with an opportunity to apply transportation and planning methods to developing policy alternatives in the context of environmental politics.

These are course materials for a new course at the intersection of civil discourse and public policy.  The course was developed and taught at the Biden School at the University of Delaware.  Support for this course was provided by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative.

15.975 U-Lab: Leading Profound Innovation for a More Sustainable World is an interactive and experiential class about leading profound innovation for pioneering a more sustainable economy and society. The class is organized around personal reflection practices, relational practices, and societal practices. It focuses on the intertwined relationship between the evolution of capitalism, multi-stakeholder innovation, and presencing.

After an opening discussion of systems thinking and models, student use webDICE , an online Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy model developed by Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the University of Chicago. Students will manipulate input parameters and interpret output in small groups in-class and individually out of class to complete the major mid-module assignment. The goal is to develop their understanding of the sources of uncertainty around future predictions of climate change and its impacts. Students are also introduced to the concept of Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) which is central to subsequent units in this module.

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Urban renewal policies enacted in San Francisco's Fillmore district in the 1950s-60s provide a vivid case study in public policy, federal and local government, and citizen activism. This important history sheds light on present-day urban renewal policies, such as empowerment zones and welfare-to-work.

This module contains an 8-lesson curriculum to study greenhouse gases and global warming using data and visualizations. The students will summarize the issue in a mock debate or a presentation.

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This course seeks to provide a supportive context for students to grow significantly as writers by discovering and engaging with issues that matter to them. Writing on social and ethical issues, we can see ourselves within a tradition of authors such as Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., who have used the power of the pen to inspire social change.

Growth of the open science movement has drawn significant attention to data sharing and availability across the scientific community. In this study, we tested the ability to recover data collected under a particular funder-imposed requirement of public availability. We assessed overall data recovery success, tested whether characteristics of the data or data creator were indicators of recovery success, and identified hurdles to data recovery. Overall the majority of data were not recovered (26% recovery of 315 data projects), a similar result to journal-driven efforts to recover data. Field of research was the most important indicator of recovery success, but neither home agency sector nor age of data were determinants of recovery. While we did not find a relationship between recovery of data and age of data, age did predict whether we could find contact information for the grantee. The main hurdles to data recovery included those associated with communication with the researcher; loss of contact with the data creator accounted for half (50%) of unrecoverable datasets, and unavailability of contact information accounted for 35% of unrecoverable datasets. Overall, our results suggest that funding agencies and journals face similar challenges to enforcement of data requirements. We advocate that funding agencies could improve the availability of the data they fund by dedicating more resources to enforcing compliance with data requirements, providing data-sharing tools and technical support to awardees, and administering stricter consequences for those who ignore data sharing preconditions.

This activity utilizes publicly available, proposed national legislation to provide a platform for student inquiry into the intersection of climate science, environmental economics and sustainable public policy.

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