Cars and Nature: a case study in environmental economics for educational programs

Environmental education needs to include the economic dimension. For example, the formulation of public policy to achieve environmental goals needs to include appropriate economic incentives to guide human behavior, otherwise, the policies may not be effective and may even be counter‐productive. Using the car as a focal point for integration, the proposed case study for science and economics students examines the design of appropriate economic incentives to engender less driving, identifies the pros and cons of alternative policies and helps educators conceptualize the interdisciplinary relationships between automobile use and other social issues, such as highway safety, air and water quality, taxation issues, geographic sprawl of development throughout the countryside, disruption of wildlife habitat and migration patterns, etc. The United States’ strategy of requiring automobile manufacturers to produce vehicles with increasingly higher fuel efficiency may be counter‐productive to the extent that getting more miles per gallon lowers the cost of driving each mile, other factors remaining the same, thus giving consumers an incentive to travel more miles.