Teaching

I teach graduate and undergraduate versions of an interdisciplinary course on energy and materials sustainability. The course starts with thermodynamic laws, major material cycles, and definitions of sustainability. It surveys global energy and material resources and examines current and potential technologies for providing human services in a sustainable way. The course then shifts to economics and policy to assess how and at what cost human activity might be sustainable. Finally, it addresses challenging issues such as how to achieve global agreements on greenhouse gas emission reduction, how to have environmentally benign economic growth, and how to understand and work with human psychological traits that make sustainability so challenging. The graduate course is numbered REM 650 and the undergraduate course REM 350.