Sorry i couldn’t get the format correct here. I have the chicago format on the Google Doc that I worked on. The Figures are also becoming pixelated when I ass them here for some reason.
Title : A Green World Built on Education
University Education and the Future of the World
The professional world, where several companies and governments come together to make decisions about the future of the planet, runs on the leadership of specialized individuals that are educated in their particular fields. Who has the society entitled the responsibility of educating these individuals? It is academia, which has been successful at making these individuals get better at bringing growth and opportunity to their area of work, but has failed to give knowledge to protect the very planet that all people live on.
Professionals from only a few fields of studies are worried about the harm of climate change to the world, while others are largely concerned about growing their own sectors in the economy. A system change needs to occur to modernize the education system. The start can be from Penn State University’s industrial engineering curriculum, by making its courses address the issue of climate change and help build professionals for the future who are willing to solve climate change. Through the issue brief, first the economic growth versus the carbon footprint of the industrial sector will be compared, followed by an analysis of current Penn State Industrial engineering curriculum, and then suggest system changes that could be implemented to create a green future built from education.
The Dark History of Pennsylvania and Its Black Gold
The problem of climate change affects everyone on Earth. In the case of Pennsylvania, pollution from industries like steel production and coal mining have had a massive impact on the climate of the state. Looking specifically at coal, Pennsylvania has had a huge history of abandoned mine lands (AMLs). According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, mining companies, after complete extraction of coal from an area, would simply move to another area, abandoning the original land and “failing to restore Earth’s previous condition” . Such actions have caused waterways to be polluted, destruction and damage to property, and loss of thousands of lives due to toxic chemical release in the air.
The damage done by AWLs is not limited to a few counties of Pennsylvania, but majority, 47 out of 63 to be specific. The geographical damage of AWLs can be visualized through Figure 1. Almost every county in Pennsylvania has on average dozens of these AWLs, with some counties having hundreds. Even though the demand of coal has reduced drastically in the state since the 1940s due to decline of Pennsylvania’s steel industry, its aftermath, which are these AWLs, continue to damage the state. The deterioration that they cause to the local climate and culture is felt the worst by people living next to them.
Figure 1: Number of AWLs in different counties of Pennsylvania
Source: “PA’s Mining Legacy and AML.” Department of Environmental Protection, n.d. https://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/Land/Mining/AbandonedMineReclamation/AMLProgramInformation/Pages/PA’s-Mining-Legacy-and-AML.aspx#:~:text=When%20all%20available%20coal%20was,mine%20lands%20were%20left%20abandoned.
AWLs and the damage done by the coal industry is just one example, steel and many other industries of Pennsylvania are also guilty of causing continuous environmental damage to the nature of their local habitats. The steel industry specifically is discussed in more depth in the latter parts of the text.
Such unsustainable industrial actions are not only a theme in industries of Pennsylvania, but all over the world. With specialists educated in universities trained on only focusing on production and price, environmental sustainability gets left behind.
Capturing The Gravity of Industries’ Pollution Problem
Most sectors in the U.S economy have seen economic prosperity and have grown dramatically in the past two decades. Looking at parts of industry sector like manufacturing (which saw average growth of 3% in 2022), healthcare (which saw average growth of 3% in 2021), and steel (which saw average growth of 21% in 2021) it becomes clear that academia is creating robust scholars to increase the size of the economy, but is this growth considerate of the environment?
The Most Polluting Economic Sectors
Every sector of the economy releases a certain amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere due to the processes involved in making that sector work. The industry sector is one of the most polluting sectors in the economy due to the amount of energy it needs to operate; energy which is often provided using non renewable sources that pollute the environment. Figure 2 illustrates the global greenhouse gasses released from different sectors of the economy. Out of all the greenhouse gas emissions released globally, 24.2% come from producing the energy needed to power the industry sector alone.
Figure 2: Global greenhouse gas emissions by sector
Source: Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. 2020. “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Our World in Data. 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector.
These emissions keep on growing as these sectors keep on growing. According to an article by Shannon Osaka, an author at the Washington Post, “carbon emissions from fossil fuels in 2022 are expected to reach 37.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the highest ever recorded.” What is needed to make a change is a transformation in academia, the cause of the problem, by making curricula directed towards addressing sustainability.
Bringing A Difference Through A Change in Academia
The Current Industrial Engineering Curriculum at Penn State
Current Industrial Engineering (IE) program at Penn State, which is managed by the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, and supervised on the curriculum by the Department of Curriculum, equips its students with skills that can be quite useful in their future as an industrialist. Courses like IE 305, 402, and 425 can help students think like engineers, economists, and mathematicians, making them a beneficial addition to any field of industry they join. These courses provide a deep understanding of concepts that can be crucial to an industrialist like: product design (with emphasis on specification and measurement), risk analysis (determining success of a project under predictable, but uncertain circumstances), and modeling stochastic systems (using mathematical processes to boost manufacturing and service systems). Graduates from this program are able to gain high positioned jobs in reputable companies.
However, it is quite surprising that none of the IE courses at Penn State are aimed towards environmental sustainability. Over the course of 4 years, an IE student can only learn about the environment and sustainability through particular General Education courses in natural science, or through a particular Science Elective related to environment and sustainability (which a student is not obliged to take). In such cases most IE graduates end up graduating with a solid knowledge of industries, but little knowledge of how to operate them with careful consideration of the environment. An example of this is the iron and steel industry, guilty of huge carbon emissions, which constantly falls behind when it comes to decarbonising their processes. Even with scientific solutions like the use of hydrogen instead of carbon to purify iron ore, development in such areas remains stagnant. According to the European Parliament’s report on the potential of hydrogen in decarbonising steel, it will take at least till 2030 for “green steel” to be able to compete in the market due to slow developments towards it.
With Penn State’s Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and the Department of Curriculum holding the power of educating industrialists from several different industries, it becomes their responsibility to continuously modernize the curriculum in order to keep students updated to the ongoing issues on the planet and act accordingly. However, to do so, one can no longer wait for smaller changes to gradually build up to a larger impact, but rather a whole system change is needed that brings new values and themes to the curriculum.
Bringing a System Change to the IE curriculum at Penn State
The IE curriculum at Penn State needs a system change which makes the curriculum majority of the courses incorporating environmental sustainability in them. Taking examples of courses and skills mentioned earlier in the passage, IE 305 can put special attention throughout the course on designing products with high performance along with less environmental impact throughout their life cycle. IE 402 can define success of a project with not just its economic returns, but also its low carbon emissions.
Implements like these can be made in almost all IE courses, making them shift the focus of the course from addressing only internalities, to a more complex and complete study of internalities and externalities. A study of internalities can help predict damages to the future of an industrial process that can occur due to the current actions of the process. While a study of externalities can help predict the future damage to the environment that can occur due to the current actions of the process. A process of course needs to be robust and not damage itself to continue in the future, but even in such a case, a process that destroys the environment it thrives in indirectly destroys its own future. Academia usually focuses only on the former due to its impacts being direct, ignoring the latter due its impacts being indirect. This point is discussed in a research done by Charles Perrings and published by Oxford Academia.
An analysis of both factors creates a closed loop in which materials of a process, towards the end of their life, are either disposed of in nature in a safe manner, or they end up in another process that recycles them. An illustration of this is shown in Figure 3, which displays what a steel process could look like keeping in mind the internalities and externalities. Though this view is quite optimistic, an industrialist in steel manufacturing should have a goal of being able to create such a cycle to limit the harms of steel production as much as possible.
Figure 3: A Closed Cycle of Steel Making
Background information source: Tarantola, Andrew. 2021. “We Can Make the Steel of Tomorrow without the Fossil Fuels of Yesteryear.” Engadget. October 21, 2021. https://www.engadget.com/we-can-make-the-steel-of-tomorrow-without-the-fossil-fuels-of-yesteryear-150050946.html.
Conclusion
The world for a long time has looked away from the impacts of climate change in order to feed the increasing consumption of each individual. Climate change doesn’t only bring environmental disasters, but also social disasters. Through just transformation in manufacturing of steel from current methods to the ones shown in figure 3, the global carbon emissions can be reduced by 7%. With academia paving the way for such a future the world won’t have to rely on trading economic prosperity for environmental damage.
A system change of such a kind is indeed a big demand, however, it is also a crucial one. One to revive not just nature in the state of Pennsylvania, but around the world.
Bibliography
DEUTSCH, ALISON. 2019. “The 5 Industries Driving the U.S Economy.” Investopedia. 2019. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/5-industries-driving-us-economy.asp.
European Parliament. 2020. “The Potential of Hydrogen for Decarbonising Steel Production.” https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/641552/EPRS_BRI(2020)641552_EN.pdf.
Jelani, Vincent. 2017. “How Climate Changes Affects Brazilian Agriculture.” Harvard.edu. 2017. https://scholar.harvard.edu/vincentjelani/publications/how-climate-changes-affects-brazilian-agriculture.
Langsdorf, Stefanie, Sina Löschke, Vincent Möller, Andrew Okem, Science Officer, Bardhyl Rama, Daniel Belling, et al. 2022. “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” IPCC. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844.
Osaka, Shannon. 2022. “Scientists Thought Carbon Emissions Had Peaked. They’ve Never Been Higher.” Washington Post, December 5, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/05/carbon-emissions-peak-record-2022/.
“PA’s Mining Legacy and AML.” Department of Environmental Protection, n.d. https://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/Land/Mining/AbandonedMineReclamation/AMLProgramInformation/Pages/PA’s-Mining-Legacy-and-AML.aspx#:~:text=When%20all%20available%20coal%20was,mine%20lands%20were%20left%20abandoned.
Perrings, Charles. 2021. “Environmental Externalities.” Conservation, May, 207–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190613600.003.0009.
Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. 2020. “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Our World in Data. 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector.
Statistica Research Department. 2023. “Steel Production Figures United States 2019.” Statista. January 5, 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/209343/steel-production-in-the-us/.
Tarantola, Andrew. 2021. “We Can Make the Steel of Tomorrow without the Fossil Fuels of Yesteryear.” Engadget. October 21, 2021. https://www.engadget.com/we-can-make-the-steel-of-tomorrow-without-the-fossil-fuels-of-yesteryear-150050946.html.
Trading Economics. 2023. “United States Manufacturing Production – February 2023 Data – 1920-2022 Historical.” Tradingeconomics.com. February 2023. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/manufacturing-production#:~:text=Manufacturing%20Production%20in%20the%20United%20States%20averaged%203.63%20percent%20from.
US EPA. 2021. “EPA Report Shows Disproportionate Impacts of Climate Change on Socially Vulnerable Populations in the United States.” Www.epa.gov. September 2, 2021. https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-report-shows-disproportionate-impacts-climate-change-socially-vulnerable.