The United Nations (UN), a body that represents virtually all of the world’s governments, recently described climate change as “the defining issue of our time.” In fact, this understates the case. Climate change is a phenomenon that is global in scale, affecting every part of the planet – albeit unevenly. It has its roots at least two centuries in the early days of the Industrial Revolution (if not earlier). And the impacts of current change will persist for millennia into the future. And given the ubiquitousness of fossil fuel-based energy systems, virtually every aspect of our lives is implicated in climate change in some way. 

One of the working assumptions of this course is that “Climate Change Politics” is too big for anyone to grasp with any degree of certainty or completeness, much less to cover in a single-semester course. In the course, we will work through (and create) a number of models that provide graspable, but imperfect, representations of climate change politics. Throughout the course, we will seek to reflect on how, and how well, these models represent climate change and the political conflicts and solutions that surround it. 

The course is divided into three parts. The first covers climate change politics at the international scale, culminating with an in-class simulation of international climate negotiations (the “World Climate Simulation”). The second surveys a range of ideological positions, or “lenses,” that people use to understand and engage politically with climate change. In the final section, students will develop and run their own models of a particular facet of climate change politics.