ECON 210 – Climate Change Economics and Policy

This course introduces students to the role of applied economics in climate change policy and analysis. Students will learn how economists view climate change causes, mitigation, adaptation, and policy challenges. Key topics include: economics of market failures, socially optimal greenhouse gas emissions, overview of theoretical and real-world policies to reduce emissions, evaluating the relative abatement costs of command and control versus market-based policies, valuing climate change impacts, evidence of adaptation strategies in the economy, discounting costs and benefits across multiple generations, impacts of uncertainty on optimal policy design, the role of international cooperation and consequences of unilateral action, and distributional effects.