Energy, Clean Innovation & Sustainability

This Writing in the Major (WIM) course for Public Policy will focus on students being able to identify innovative solutions to address the energy, environmental, and infrastructure challenges in North America and clearly communicate these strategies for problem solving and/or regional green growth strategy development. Students will learn how to write policy analysis memos, presentations, and reports for decision makers in the public sector while also being able to identify and assess economic development and/or business opportunities to advance sustainability and low carbon development at the regional level. Clean Innovation through technological, business, policy and social innovation is needed to produce the goods and services that will enable a carbon neutral future in the region. This transformative process, along with the innovation cycles of the energy, water, urban, transport and digital sectors, is full of business opportunities. Efforts to advance smarter, cleaner, inclusive and more prosperous communities in North America presents a great opportunity for innovation, entrepreneurship and well-integrated planning for low-carbon economic development in the region. Our course will aim to utilize the Stanford Silicon Valley ingenuity, combined with California's policy experience and leadership in advancing climate and sustainability locally and at the global level as a source of inspiration to articulate pertinent and pragmatic solutions in order to address longstanding and emerging cross-country energy and environment policy issues in the region. It will also analyze the challenges that electoral political cycles and the constant evolution of the institutional context for energy and environmental cooperation present among the three members of the United States-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA). In addition, this course will satisfy the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement for Public Policy. As such, this course focuses on policy writing short memos, PowerPoint and a policy report. By the end of the course, students should be able to craft a concise 1-2 page memo that conveys policy analysis (possibly including graphs/tables or other data) to support its recommendations and central arguments. In addition, they will learn to work with team members on a short policy or implementation strategy paper from an interdisciplinary perspective as is typically done in policy arenas.