We’ve spent a few weeks now thinking about a bunch of issues relevant to environmental policy, like different classes of policies, the design of market-based policies, and the distributional effects and political economy of policies. Along the way we’ve read (and listened and watched things) about real-world environmental problems and policies.

Today we’ll try to bring all this together to think about solutions to a specific issue: what do we do about abandoned oil and gas wells? Read the piece here about “How Texas’s zombie oil wells are creating an environmental disaster zone”. There’s a PDF posted to Canvas in case you run into a paywall or are otherwise unable to use the link here.

Take 5-10 minutes to read the piece and take some notes. Then discuss the following questions with your groupmates:

  1. What is the core environmental problem here? Who are the parties affected, and what are their interests?

  2. What questions would you need to answer (or information would you need) in order to propose a policy solution which is BOTH effective at addressing the problem AND likely to be adopted?

  3. What solutions are you currently leaning towards? How might the answers/information you described above affect your preferences over solutions?

  4. What does “success” look like for your solution? How would it be measured?

  5. Suppose your solution is politically feasible and likely to be adopted. What infrastructure (administrative, technological, economic, etc) would you need to make your solution more effective?

  6. How could your proposed solution go wrong? How and when would you be able to detect that it’s going wrong?

You’ll discuss these questions for about 30 minutes. You don’t need to come up with answers to all of them, or even any of them—environmental policy is hard and if people could solve this issue in 30 minutes we wouldn’t be talking about it. Rather, the point is to get some practice with the following steps:

  1. identifying the key problem and interests;
  2. thinking about what you don’t know that you need to find out;
  3. developing a sense of what “success” and “failure” would look like, and how you would actually determine which is occurring.

Once we reconvene, your group will give a brief report (about 3-5 minutes) to the others about your discussion. Which of the questions you raised seem especially interesting/important? Did you reach any conclusions? Are there interesting connections to other topics we’ve discussed/read about that you want to highlight? Choose one person to give your report to the class.