What do public comments on environmental regulations reveal about social inequality?

This project is an exploratory CSS analysis of public comments on the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a measure proposed to reduce greenhouse gases. This exploratory research will evaluate the suitability of assessing public comments to investigate social inequality related to environmental outcomes and will help develop computational methods for approximating societal attitudes toward environmental outcomes for use in decision support tools. This project would contribute to my research platform not only by providing preliminary data on public attitudes about environmental decision making, but also by supporting the claim that social science is not only complementary to, but likely prerequisite for, socially conscious, ethics-driven engineering. The leveraging of CSS tools in particular provides an additional link to the engineering community.