Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Fall 12-6-2017

Faculty Advisor(s)

Dr. Allen MacVicar

Abstract

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is my findings on the difference in governmental perspective on renewable energy and programs formed because of this perspective. I started with finding the French equivalent of the EPA; to them, known as le Ministre de Transition Ecologique et Solidaire. After this, I analyzed the two documents (the Strategic Plan and le Panorama) that they both provide to the public stating their goals for the coming year and progress made over the past year(s). I found that while France was indeed ahead of its neighbors and other countries, they had little to say as far as concrete progress made towards their goals— or at least little numeric evidence. Quite the opposite was true for the US. They had little federal programs while documenting extensively their progress and numbers on such subjects. For a better insight into why this is, I looked to the two leaders of the group: Nicholas Hulot and Scott Pruitt. Perspective was absolutely represented from the two figureheads from the group and seemed to trickle down into the programs run by the two departments. This organizational perspective is abundantly clear in their electric car programs. In France, there is a heavy concentration on making electric cars more affordable for the every day consumer with rebates and tax breaks if consumers trade in their old vehicles. In the US, it is mostly left up to the individual states to decide how much money they want to allocate to these sorts of programs. While there are small rebate programs in some states, there are mostly tax breaks offered by the state and federal government. All this being said, the EPA continues to push the importance of data collection and processing around the effectiveness of these programs. While it can be debated both ways, there are many ways in which the two organizations could learn from each other with an exchange of methods, numbers and program strategy.

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Presented at the Fall 2017 Student Research Day at Chapman University.

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