The objective of this assignment is twofold. First, as students of governmental responses to global climate change, we will frequently be asked to explain and sometimes defend the “fact” that the U.S. national government is not doing anything about global climate change. Five hundred bills containing “climate change” or “global warming” in their text is not “nothing”. At the same time, global climate change has not seen as much activity in congress as, for example, “health care” with about 1600 bills introduced during the same period.

Through this collaborative effort, we learn about climate-change related activities in congress since 2009, the industries they target, and the relationship between mitigation and adaptation efforts. Second, this review will enable us to understand how U.S. politics balance protection of the global atmosphere with other important principles and policy goals, such as job creation, competitiveness, social justice, poverty, and others.

Each student signed-up online to review 35 congressional bills. They read these bills and prepared a 5 minute oral presentation about them. In their presentations, students examined the following aspects of the bills:

(1) policy issues;

(2) technologies/industries;

(3) institutions, including governmental entities that will implement the bill and types of policy instruments that would be employed.

The document linked below is a very rough summary of the work prepared by students. It is incomplete. Students were given the freedom to organize and collect their data individually. For the purpose of sharing content online, this requirement will likely change with future classes. Overtime, as more students take the course and complete this assignment with more coherence our database will grow.