Harvard’s proposed climate major raises concerns about lack of free-market perspectives

Harvard University recently announced a proposed concentration titled “Energy, Climate, and Environment.” If approved, it will launch in the 2026-27 school year as the fourth climate-focused major on campus.

In response, critics have expressed concerns that the concentration will fail to address free-market perspectives.

Harvard began promoting this program through a gateway course taught by three professors from the history, physics, and sociology departments. “Gateway to Energy, Climate and Environment” was offered for the first time this spring, according to The Harvard Crimson. 

The course “is case-based with selected large-scale problems that illustrate the complexity and the multidisciplinary approach required for solutions to problems of climate change,” according to the class description.

“It will give students the bigger picture, and they will gain a sense of agency – that they can contribute to finding and implementing solutions. And importantly, the class will help students identify the particular aspects of the problems that they would like to focus on in their further studies at Harvard,” the description reads. 

In an email to The Fix, University of Southern California Economics Professor Matthew Kahn said the importance of free market environmentalism needs to be a part of any sustainability-focused major.

“Every sustainability major should have an active debate in the 101 class on the benefits and the costs of market capitalism for the environment. I am an unabashed free market environmentalist and I’m worried that this leading university isn’t going to expose first year students to such a viewpoint,” he said.

“During a time when we celebrate intellectual diversity, I ask that Harvard consider having free market thinkers co-teach with the sociologists and literature experts,” the professor said.

This is an issue Kahn said he has seen throughout his career. “When I taught at UCLA, the same issue arose,” he told The Fix. “My free-market environmentalist views weren’t that well received by most of my environmental faculty colleagues.”

Kahn also said the average K-12 public school experience does not expose students to thinkers in this field, leaving them unlikely to encounter diverse viewpoints.

“I am worried that the typical American student educated in our K-12 public school system isn’t exposed to Milton Friedman’s ideas about the power of markets to improve the quality of life of poor people and middle class people,” he said.

The professor also wrote a Substack post arguing the course may carry an ideological slant while being presented at a high-school level.

He told The Fix that some people have misinterpreted his Substack. “I didn’t say replace the sociologists with economists!” he said. “I explicitly said ‘co-teach’ together.  Let’s have some exciting debates and allow young people to decide!”

In his Substack, Khan also wrote that while the major’s details are still emerging, it looks to be a “prime example” of how a university launches an ideologically slanted major without anyone noticing.

“This could be a great inter-disciplinary major that allows for truly free thought and debate but it looks to me like the fix is in!” he wrote.

In defense of the new proposal, James Stock, Harvard’s vice provost for climate and sustainability, told the Washington Free Beacon that the school is committed to making the course “rigorous” and will include a “statistics requirement.”

He also said this major is not a duplicate of Harvard’s other environment-focused study paths.

“We don’t really want to have duplication,” he said. Harvard is “in the process of trying to make it non-duplicative.”

Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin, who co-teaches “Gateway to Energy, Climate and Environment,” also endorsed the new concentration.

“With the climate crisis, we have to throw everything we’ve got at it,” she said, according to The Crimson. 

“Thinking that one discipline or one set of skills is going to do it is, I think, too naive,” Chaplin said. “A lot of different efforts are going to be necessary.”

The College Fix attempted to reach Stock and Harvard’s media relations via email on multiple occasions, but has received no reply.