Going Green with the College of Liberal Arts

Yeah.

Alright, we're going to get started here. Welcome my name is Jessica Rencher and I'm the recruitment coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts. I am also a graduate student and I'm joined today by a few guest speakers as well as student panel of 1 Jenna. So we're going to start with our guest speakers, Doctor Barbier, did I say Barbier? Is that how you say your last name? Would you mind?

Would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself and then we'll go to Doctor Iverson, an icy that Angela is on here as well. Angela, if you want to just hit broadcast, then will be able to see you.

Alright.

Doctor Barbier, do you want to introduce yourself?

Sure, yeah, so my name is Ed Barbier. I'm a professor in the Department of Economics. Although I've I've been at CSU just for three years. I have been working on problems of the environment for my entire career in numerous universities and also outside of universities for governments, nongovernment organizations, and so forth. And so most of the research.

That I do in environmental resource economics is what we call applied research is it deals with specific problems and given the topic here of going green, one of the things that I have done throughout my queer is is focused on how do you build what are the policies you need to build a greener economy? And that's come in focus a lot in the last several months as we start to in this country and around the world. Think about how do we want our recovery from.

COVID-19 to go. How do we want our economic recovery to develop? And in particular is there? Is there a way of making the recovery more green to to to actually lead to less carbon emissions? More saving of the environment and to fostering the type of innovations and clean energy and other green sectors that we want? And so I've been working a lot on that with with various UN organisations. I just did a report.

Are you an environment program on that? And I've published a couple of papers that that look at what does it mean for major economies? What does it mean for developing economies? So that's one of the things I do Meanwhile. There's other ongoing projects that I do in the Department, so for a couple years now and for three years in total I I have a project that's funded by the National Science Foundation and by which involves a consortium.

Of international researchers and my group here in the Department of Economics, and it's focusing on.

Case study in the Québec Province of Québec in Canada, where Canada in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and then the rivers of Saint Lawrence. There are a number of fisheries. There are shrimp, fisheries and snow. Crab fisheries and yellow perch, which are very valuable fisheries, but it's a very populated in rapidly developing area with lots of agriculture, so there's tons of pollution that is dumped into the sea in the rivers, the Québec government and the Government of Canada have been trying to clean it up.

And they want to know what's been the impact on the fisheries that both the pollution in the water and also their policies for trying to control that pollution. And so myself and a graduate student here in our Department is working on our org on the study and the study will be part of her PhD dissertation and then work moving forward. I'm doing with my my wife Joe Burgess who is also in our Department. We're about to embark on a major.

Policy review and study for the UN for the UN Environment Programme on peatlands and peatlands are what most of us think are just boggy swamps, but peatlands are really important and valuable both as the sink for carbon so for greenhouse gases and carbon, and also if you destroy peatlands, 'cause people mined peatlands, 'cause the Pete is used, what people put in their gardens, you know when you want to grow vegetables or Flowers, many people get.

Pete from from horticultural shops and from garden centers, and they put the Pete on their their ground to to fertilize and to.

Help grow their vegetables, but that comes from peatlands and that's mine from the peatlands from the bogs and that ends up destroying the bogs and then also in some parts of the world, they used peatlands.

Fuel it's very dense and they burn it. Now the problem is if you do that then you're releasing more carbon into the atmosphere and then also the bugs and no peatlands start to disappear and then you lose important sites for wildlife and biodiversity. So there's a real trade off here and So what the UN wants us to do is to explain the economics, not the biology of it or the climate science of it, but explain what is or what are the tradeoffs involved here, who gains, who loses?

What are the benefits and costs of preserving peatlands as opposed to converting them so that that's a bunch of the research I do? And then of course, the reason there's a whole bunch of us who do environmental work in our Department of Economics is it's one of the key pillars of our Department. We have a number of courses at the graduate level, an undergraduate level that focus on environmental economics, which is the application of economics.

Two environmental problems. And then you're going to have Doctor Terry Agrasen talking about his work and one of our PhD students, Angela Mensah, talk about her work, so that's probably enough for me and I'm happy to take questions about any of this work.

Thank you so much, Doctor Iverson, would you mind sharing about the work that you're doing into our participants? If you have questions, go ahead and type them in the chat and we'll make sure to get to them in answer them. Alright, go ahead, doctor Iverson.

Great, OK, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Wish we could all be in person but.

So my research is primarily in the area of the economics of climate change, so about three years ago, the Nobel Prize in Economics went for work developing the use of economic models combined with Earth system models to think about questions related to how much climate policy should we have. What's the right level of a of a carbon price and an economic model and a portion of my work is in the vein of that literature.

And some of it thinking about different ways in which people value the future. It turns out the way in which people value outcomes fifty 102 hundred years into the future have a huge impact on the level of climate policy that that makes sense from a sort of governmental perspective. And there's lots of open questions about how people think about the future and thinking about incorporating those ideas into the same kinds of climate models that are conventionally used in economics.

So that's a portion of what I would have worked on. I also have work looking at.

The dealing with a kind of bigger quite well. It's a somewhat different question that has to do with how do we succeed and keeping a substantial portion of the carbon embedded in the Earth's crust permanently trapped underground because it turns out there's there's very strong economic incentives to dig it up and burn it, and the types of policies that are typically pursued by governments.

I don't.

Focus on restricting demand for carbon, so something like a carbon tax that we've all heard of probably tends to reduce how much carbon people burn, but it doesn't necessarily keep, for example, the state of Colorado from digging up the natural gas and coal under foot and oil under foot and either burning it in Colorado or increasingly burning it elsewhere. So we just ship it in train cars to other states, or we even ship it overseas to China and things like that so.

And then we import goods back from China so it turns out that if we're not careful, we can very easily think we're doing something. But sort of be treading water and not making progress. So some of my work is thought about advantages of using something like carbon capture and storage from the perspective of this kind of what would be called the supply side benefit that you sort of permanently preemptively retire the carbon rather than than leave it available for some future politicians to say, oh, we're going to burn this because it's.

Worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it's very hard to withstand that temptation.

So that's another question. I've also been working on on models related to adaptation to sea level rise in cities where where infrastructure is is at risk and then actually over the last six months. I've actually so kind of interesting Lee the same models that are used to think about climate policy where you have, say in Earth systems model and you're trying to solve an economic model taking into account how the system evolves into the future.

Those same models or the same kind of structure can apply equally to thinking about questions related to optimal lockdowns for covid or pandemic etc. So I've been doing research just in the last six months that that applies similar ideas and concepts and modeling strategies to think about the optimal level of social distancing for covid and so actually Ed's been involved in a class that we're teaching in our Department this semester. That's called the economics of covid. That's been kind of a fun.

A little discursion from our usual areas of research so.

It's all, I'll stop there. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Yes, thank you so much. Doctor Iverson, an again to our participants. Please feel free if you have questions to type them in the chat and will answer them. We are going to hand it over to Angela in Angela is a doctoral student and she is doing incredible work in the Econ Department. So Angela, do you want to share about the work that you are doing?

I think she just disappeared off though Web and R.

Hello.

Open timing.

She probably clicked.

Hear me, I can hear me.

We can hear you.

Can you hear me?

All good.

Alright, so.

I'm a PhD student at Southwest, literally introduce.

My field or my email is actually in.

Just as I thought at Professor and Terry are doing that literally nothing, and currently I'm very actively.

Anne.

Join a bed.

App founded by the UNB and it's.

Controlling plastic pollution.

After that, the situational execution is much more of a problem in developing distant. It is in the West, so we have.

Here we have more.

Um people in the world so that there are very policies now to try there.

Result question even though we are not getting a straight afternoon as a country especially I work a lot on plastic pinga and.

Yeah.

I actually wanted to ask you a question too. And Terry, who are both working on natural resource and climate issues. I was thinking that he's maintained and resource depletion. It's a partner or he has.

Should these policies or research becomes specific? Because if let's say now that the US is pushing to have the Green Deal. If they even started and Damascus he doesn't do it, what would that mean for the?

And yeah, caring.

Even now in Africa may come into this country oil because they have the technological know how to exploit that and just when they got the technology, exploit the oil. Then we have the Paris agreement coming up so.

What can we say to that? Should we say continued ploy or or it's kind of any questions?

I'm happy to throw in a couple of thoughts.

Why should?

I I so this is, this is that that exact debate and argument plays out in the major climate agreements, when the countries of the world get together and try to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris accord, and it's typically a block of developing countries that are saying that exact argument to the developed countries. You guys got rich burning fossil fuels. Why should we give up our own development and pulling our own people out of poverty?

Because you guys piled all of this carbon into the atmosphere and it's a very critical, crucial and and you know natural, fair, fair point and consideration. And I think the that that that kind of debate has has played out as typically evolves into the premise that the rich countries of the world are going to have to help cover the bill for climate policy more than the poor countries of the world.

Of course, part of the problem is that there's not political will in the rich countries of the world to reduce their own emissions more or less reduce the emissions of all the countries of the world. But you're also right that it doesn't work. To address this problem without a global agreement or there's massive problems doing so, and we really, ultimately do need a global agreement so.

Maybe that's just that's the beginning of a longer conversation, but I think that that that's a really important point.

If I may, if I may add so when I was doing work I've been doing work on green recoveries and green fair transitions for some time, and one of the points that make is that is that there's this false dichotomy between you have a choice between either economic growth or Environmental Conservation, and that's the economy that false dichotomy applies just as much to.

Developing countries as it does to richer countries, on the other hand, if we are.

About what the weather I mean is that there are plenty of policies that are taking place in developing countries that are possibly reducing poverty. Anna tackling problems of hunger, but they're doing at a huge cost to the economies and the people of developing countries. So the growth is there's a lot of evidence to show that the growth has been less sustainable and also less inclusive, meaning the gap between rich and poor is actually growing in metastasis and in some of their.

Poorest countries of the world. And that means that there is a way in which we can build better policies that would would be win wins within developing countries and the suite of policies are different than what you would want rich countries to do. So to give you an example.

Some people might be surprised to know that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized in many low and middle income countries, particularly in middle income countries, and these subsidies tend to benefit consumers in these countries in cities, and particularly wealthier since wealthier citizens in cities. So these subsidies are actually subsidizing the use of cars and the use of a particular gasoline, and for wealthy lifestyles in.

In developing countries and not benefiting the poor. And So what some people have argue, and I think it's a reasonable argument is that if we could take some of those subsidies from subsidizing.

Fossil fuel consumption mainly in cities and mainly for urban leads. And we put that instead too.

To support the expansion of rule rule, electrification and particularly renewable resources and energy efficiency in rural areas where most of the poverty is in developing countries, that's a win win in terms of poverty alleviation and improving the environment. And there's many examples of that. Same thing with irrigation subsidies, fishing subsidies, plastics as Angelus, pointed out. Plastic consumption is mainly by the wealth heist by the wealthiest.

And elites two impacts on coastal fishing, which impacts the livelihood of poor people in those areas. So there's a number of policies. If you can go through individually where you can see the environmental gains, the economic gains, and the gains in terms of reducing inequality can can with the right mix of policies, you can go down that level, and that's really important.

Thank you so much Angela. I appreciate that question, and it's fascinating to me and I'm not even in your field of study. So thank you very much and Doctor Iverson and Doctor Barbier, thank you also for your responses. Jenna, do you have any questions from a student perspective? Anything that you're curious about that has been shared so far in the web and R.

And if you don't, that's fine, but I just want to give you a chance to speak. If you do have something.

Well, I'm kind of thinking about is that I personally am not involved in environmental stuff through the liberal lights, so I'm kind of learning throughout this to an I think, just for students in general, putting environmental programs with the liberal arts isn't something they necessarily think of right away, so I guess maybe something I have is a question from someone who recruits for the liberal arts and talks to students.

What are some things I could tell them about how they can combine these two areas that seem like originally they may not go together but actually do?

Well, if I may chip in there, that's a great question. Jenna Ann in our Department we teach at all levels. Environmental economics. At one level you have the PhD and where Angela is at, where it is highly technical and highly developed at the other end of the undergraduate level. We also teach it different levels. So for example, there's a course in our Department which we teach every semester, and it's very popular.

Not just with our students, but with students throughout the CL. A an entire University and it's called E Con 240 and its issues and environmental economics, and it's an introductory course which does not require any prior economics and what we do is we take students from all sorts of backgrounds. We have students from, from from creative writing and dance and theater in the CL, a two students.

Like equestrian studies, we have students studying ecology in the Warner College and we have some economics majors that takes this course and they basically are shown how basic principles and economics can be used to think about everyday environmental problems in big policy issues from climate change to biodiversity loss, to water scarcity and and we basically show them how economists think about the problem and how we can start to think about.

Policy solutions from an economic lens and I know other departments in the college do the same thing. So for example, other department's think about how literature, for example approaches the environment, how it thinks about reviews, the environment. But in our Department we're trying to use all levels of our Department, from from the very basic undergraduate courses to the to the top graduate ones, to introduce students to economics.

Of the environment and then finally, Doctor Bisson mentioned our most basic course, which is Econ 101, which is about the economics of covid and even in there you know, Professor Iverson is brought in. You know, how do you think about covid and climate change? I've brought in? How do you think about the post covid recovery? If you want to green it? And we looked at in my my section of the course. We looked at Joe Biden's, the President Elect's plan for for a green recovery, and said, what was this a good plan? What's in it? What's missing?

And I get students to think about that, and so we have lots of opportunities in our Department at all levels for students to think economically about the environment.

Yeah I would. I would add a couple, a couple of things maybe as well. I appreciated all of that the and I I think this is obviously over representing economics since that's our expertise and there are a number of departments in the College of Liberal Arts that have a lot of active research interests including political science, sociology, anthropology, etc. But but in economics, I think there is. It does have a very central place.

In the development and evaluation of environmental policy, historically, an in practice in government and in in groups that evaluate government policy. So economics ends. Economics is a very powerful lens for thinking about how both why does pollution arise in a market, and since we live in a market economy, there's a market system. Those insights are very far reaching an important and then thinking about how.

How do we motivate the right amount of pollution control an and how do we achieve it in the cheapest possible way? Those are sort of simple, basic questions, but the questions that the field of economics is brought very insightful.

Tried and true longstanding insights into that. That turned out to be core to thinking about environmental problems in a in a practical setting. So, so I think economics is it's it's maybe not always recognized as a core piece of environmental policy, but it, but it very much plays that role in practice for good reason.

Thank you.

So.

I wanted to ask it.

Doctor, you've been working on their post or not by recovery giving that because countries had direct investment in.

Call a human. Is my investment in the environment.

And probably kind of put us through all the progress that have been made over the years for ensuring the cleaner.

I'm not sure I heard completely all all of what your question, 'cause there's some static on the line there, Angela, but I I think two things we should realize about this pandemic. That's is devastating for all countries. Actually, three things. The first is that the economic and health cost is huge. There's no question, and we don't really know we're still in it and we're getting.

Everywhere it's getting worse, so we still don't know the full implications of the economic and health costs. The second is that what has happened in many countries, particularly in low and middle income countries, is that there's been a lot of relaxing of environmental regulations and control of things such as deforestation, land use, conversion, pollution, and so forth has simply.

That control and regulation by governments has just has started to decline seriously, because governments are focusing their limited resources in these countries in dealing with the economic and health crisis and the massive problem. The third problem that's happened is that already we're starting to see evidence, at least according to the United Nations and others of two things going on. One is because of the loss of regulations. We're seeing much more environmental destruction than we've ever seen before, so we may see.

Less carbon dioxide emissions because economies are slowing down, and so they're not burning so much fossil fuels, but we're seeing a lot more illegal harvesting of animals as well as forests. Burning a forest, burning of land, illegal land conversion and dumping of all sorts of noxious pollution. That's that's evidence coming forward. And the second thing we're seeing, unfortunately, is a rise in poverty. So over the last 20 years since 2000.

There has been a steady decline in extreme poverty in most developing countries, but the UN projects for the first time in 2020, extreme poverty is going to go up in the latest study suggests it's going to go up by 71 million people, which is about.

Just under 1/4 of the size of the US population, so extreme poverty might be going up, and with that you're going to have problems of more malnutrition, more energy poverty, more people living more desperately. And that's going to add to the the problems that developing countries face in trying to move out of the pandemic. And so that's something we need to be aware of when we're thinking about a policy. Is that policies after the pandemic or in the recovery after the pandemic?

Have to deal with in the environmental destruction, the economic calamity, and then also the problem of rising poverty, particularly for the poorest members of society and most vulnerable.

Thank you very much. All of these questions have been so wonderful and I feel like I'm learning just by listening. Are there any other questions from any of you that you think would be informative to a prospective College of liberal arts student?

And it's OK if you don't have anything else, because I have some information I can share. OK, so we we switched the order of the web and are just a little bit. We started with our guest speakers and then I have some general information that I can share. If there are any questions along the way please stop me and I'm happy to answer those questions. So first thing that I want to just share with everyone is that the College of Liberal Arts is being very intentional about leaving.

In environmental programs and studies into as many disciplines as possible and the reason we're doing that is because we really want to develop graduates who understand the full human experience and this is going to be a pressing and critical piece of each person's life as they continue on even after college. This topic is important and it's going to continue to be in the news in our lives.

And surrounding us in all that we do, and so that's the purpose of us running this webinars because we think that it's very important for our graduates to have a grasp of this information. We have a couple of different majors with concentrations within environmental studies in addition to econ. We have poli SCI and there's an environmental in politics and policy course. Sociology does environmental sociology. We have some minors where there's applied environmental policy analysis.

And then environmental affairs. You can take a variety of courses and classes at CSU that have environmental studies at the heart of them. For instance, there's literature of the Earth. If you like to write, there's writing the environment econ of outdoor recreation. If you've enjoyed this webinar, if that's something you would like to look into, it's a 300 level class. We have a 400 level econ of energy and resources.

And then, if you're interested in policy, global environmental justice movements is of course we have ethics and of sustainability, so we have a lot of different classes with a lot of different perspectives. But they're weaving in environmental studies.

Another thing that I want to just highlight is our professors. We have a few professors on this web and R and a doctoral student and they are doing important work with researching environmental impacts within their studies. If you are in philosophy there, you'll probably do some environmental ethics classes if you are in art history, they're going to explore environmentalism through the art, and then we also have Poly side with.

Global initiatives woven into that with environmental studies.

We have ethnic studies and there's research being done on indigenous indigenous populations in the environment, including the importance of indigenous indigenous perspectives in Land Management. So these are all different applications of environmental studies woven into the experience of student in the College of Liberal Arts.

So I know that a few of you might have step off at 4:30, and that's fine.

Thank you for joining us and if you do have to go by all means please head out and then I'll continue on. Are there any questions up until this point? Thank you.

And.

OK.

I actually just. If you don't mind, I was going to interject a couple of thoughts really related to that, and then I have to go also, but I think I think it's worth worth emphasizing that the question came up. Why? Why is the liberal arts relevant to environmental problems? And I think it's.

It's it's common and natural and maybe instinctive in our society to think of environmental problems as being natural science based problems where the real hard work is that understanding the natural science origins of the problem. But the reality is that for a lot of the biggest problems take climate change is an example. The in my opinion the most important an and difficult and challenging and remaining questions have to do with how do we solve the problem, not.

Is the problem real or?

What exactly is one more decimal place of accuracy on a parameter input to some natural science model? There's a lot of ways in which our understanding of climate change hasn't changed that drastically in the last 40 years. Actually, some of the insights about the scientific problem of climate change with including the depth of uncertainty about it, were around in the late 1970s, and it's not so much that the science has changed in the Sciences.

Has gotten a lot stronger and and reinforced our certainty that it's human caused in real, but ultimately we're not. We're not actually making strides at all in the direction of solving the problem, largely, and it's not because of a lack of scientific understanding. It's it's entirely about the human side and social side of these problems. So I think these are social problems, and solving them requires an understanding of the complexity of society and humanity and and.

Governments and policy and. And so I, I think a liberal arts perspective is increasingly vital to making progress on these kind of remaining problems.

Thank you so much for sharing that Doctor Iverson because I I think that's a really great way of framing it, and I don't know that I've heard it said in like I've thought those things, but I don't know that I've ever articulated it. So thank you for adding that Jenna, Jenna. Do you have any thoughts from a student perspective? Have you taken any of these environmental classes, or do you have anything that's crossed your mind as we've been covering the different guest speakers questions? An presentation material?

And I haven't taken a lot in the environmental side. I had to take an honors seminar that had to do with like the human relationship to nature, and it covered some of these topics like relationship with indigenous people and human impact on the environment and how that's like sometimes monetary based and stuff like that. So I've had a little bit of experience with that, but not specifically through economics. Although I have taken one economics course and it was one of my favorite courses my freshman year. But I take it to fulfill my minor so.

But yeah, I really have too much to add. Other than that I liked the economics course that I took so.

Yeah, I I liked.

Great.

I like that you, um, you all are in weaving in environmental studies within Econ. I think that you go hand in hand in the complement each other so well. And I've talked with Angela a few times about the work she's doing, and I'm always fascinated by the information that she shares.

So yeah, I would agree with Jenna. I actually wish I could take some of these classes. Angela, do you have anything else that you would like to add before I go on with the presentation?

No.

I think audiosurf.

Is it?

Now it's on.

OK.

So the only time it had is that.

Students, incoming students Register for economics courses and they go to their first class.

And they see a couple of mathematical concepts that needed to be taught, and then we drop the course.

Is so we we get.

Let us because it is going to be full of mathematics and.

All I can say.

Try is doable. It is doable, you just need to love it enough and you should be able to do it.

Yeah, I tried to convince today. Don't drop it. You can do it, but I don't believe it.

So.

Get the best.

Well, I think they're lucky to have you professor, because I think that.

You it's very clear that you love what you're studying in what you're teaching, and so I think having a good professor makes all the difference with a tough subject matter such as Econ an. It's important to know it's it's kind of what makes the world turn.

So yeah, thank you.

OK.

I.

Alright, so I'll leave you guys. How do I go out?

You click broadcast.

Bye thank you. Pleasure to.

Thank you.

Yeah, good luck Jenna.

Thank you.

Bye, OK so I'll just finish up here with talking about some of the education abroad and field work. We have. The global Environmental Politics program in Brazil. In the Mediterranean. We have a program that explores food culture in the environment and then in Europe we have energy transitions. So we're really grateful that you were able to join us today. If you weren't able to join us. I know that a recording of this is going to be sent to everybody who registered and was not able to attend.

So that you can access the information if your schedule changed last minute and you weren't able to sign in, but thank you again for joining and Jenna. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

And I don't know. I don't think so. I would just say like.

I don't know the liberal arts is kind of something that you kind of make your major how you want it so you can customize it, and if there's anything that you're interested in, it consent probably somehow fit into your major. So that's something that I really like about the liberal arts and why I ended up choosing to be in the College of Arts.

Awesome, well thank you for making time for this. I know that you had a full day and you helped run a session right before this and so I really appreciate you jumping in on this one and I hope it was informative to you as well as me and anyone who is watching. Thank you.

Thank you.