What will our future look like? Will we continue burning fossil fuels or will we live in a 100% renewable world? How can we address climate change and what policies do we need to implement?

This online course explores these concerns, using models in environmental and energy economics. You will learn how to design models, how to interpret and use results to make informed decisions, and how to use models to assess energy and environmental policies. We will provide you with model examples to make you familiar with aspects of economic modelling and state-of-the-art research on current debates in energy policy.

In this course you will cover several topics:

• Climate change and energy policies.
• Evidence-based recommendations on current problems of energy policy.
• Models in environmental economics and energy economics.
• Building blocks of models and possible applications.**
• Informed decisions by the results of different modelling approaches.
  

“Weeks”, “Chapters” and invitation to comment

Please note that this course was originally published by the University of Basel on FutureLearn. FutureLearn is a global platform offering online courses that encourage social learning, including discussions between learners. On FutureLearn, we added comment sections to certain steps and measured course durations in weeks rather than in chapters.

Here on Tales, we measure courses in chapters. These chapters are equivalent to the “weeks” on FutureLearn. So when you watch a video here and hear an educator talking about “weeks”, you’ll know that this was because the videos were geared towards FutureLearn’s set-up.

Another difference to FutureLearn is the comment option. The educators in the videos will sometimes invite you to discuss something in the comments section. If you don’t see a comment option here on Tales, then the course is not open to comments at this moment in time. But for certain periods of time announced in advance, this course will be open to comments.

The good news is that either way, you can freely access the course and all of its contents at any time. If the comment section is not open, why not write down your comments as you go through the course? That way you can keep track of how your knowledge changes. And should you be able to participate in one of the authors’ face-to-face courses, you can then refer back to your comments and discuss them with your peers.