Carbon Prices and Climate Change

Positives

• The podcast features an engaging interview with MIT professor of economics Christopher Knittel.
  
• The wrap-up discussion questions are thought-provoking and require students to use critical thinking skills.

Additional Prerequisites

• The guide includes teacher pages and student pages. A PDF of just the student pages is also available near the bottom of the educator guide description page.
• Teachers should take some time to become familiar with the En-ROADS climate simulator before using it in the lesson.

Differentiation

• Civics, social studies, or geography classes could examine carbon tax and cap-and-trade models that are being used in different parts of the world and think about which models might work in the United States.
• Psychology or sociology classes could discuss barriers to carbon pricing using the following questions:
  • Do humans respond more to penalties, rewards, or a combination of the two?
  • Why would money motivate people more than the prospect of stopping climate change?
  • Is it possible that carbon pricing might make people feel like they are doing more to help the Earth than they actually are?
• Other resources on this topic include this video on carbon taxes, this report on confronting carbon inequality, and this article on how individuals can lower their carbon emissions.