Oleson Lab

Course Description

Environmental cost-benefit analysis (CBA) exists to address a specific problem: public decisions involve tradeoffs across incommensurable things, dollars, health, ecosystems, and culture, and someone must weigh them openly and consistently, rather than by whoever argues loudest in the room. CBA is one serious attempt at a transparent, replicable basis for that weighing. It is also the dominant tool federal and state agencies use to justify environmental decisions, and one of the most contested. This course teaches the mechanics of CBA (valuation, discounting, distributional analysis) with respect for the problem it is trying to solve, alongside a running critique of what the method assumes, what it leaves out, and who it tends to favor. Students learn CBA by constructing one, applied to a single Hawaiʻi-based case that runs the full semester, and by examining at every stage what the resulting number does and does not capture.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

How the Class Works

Flipped, hands-on. Pre-class preparation (a video, case, or reading, drawn from real sources rather than a textbook), followed by an in-class exercise and a hand-written worksheet submitted the same session. No lectures walking through slides. Each week meets twice, two 75-minute sessions, approximately 30 sessions across the semester.

Starting week 2, the second session of each week opens with three students giving a 90-second flash talk tied to that week's content, building oral communication skills incrementally toward the mid-semester and final presentations.

Running Case: The Waiāhole Ditch Case

The semester works from an actual legal case: In re Water Use Permit Applications (Waiāhole Ditch Combined Contested Case Hearing), 94 Hawaiʻi 97, 9 P.3d 409 (Haw. 2000). The Waiāhole Ditch, built 1913 to 1916, diverted water from windward Oʻahu streams (Waiāhole, Waikāne, Kahana) to leeward sugar plantations. When Oʻahu Sugar announced its closure in 1993 to 1994, windward taro farmers, Native Hawaiian practitioners, and community groups petitioned to restore stream flow, against leeward agricultural interests who sought to keep the ditch water flowing. The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court's 2000 decision is the leading U.S. precedent applying the public trust doctrine to water resources. It recognized instream flow, ecosystem health, and traditional Native Hawaiian and customary practices, including taro cultivation, as protected public trust purposes alongside extractive use.

The class treats this case as history and precedent, source material for analysis, rather than a dispute for the class to resolve. Implementation remains ongoing, and students are expected to bring the same care to this material that they would bring to any research involving current Native Hawaiian rights and practices.

Primary sources: full opinion; Ola i ka Wai, "Waiāhole"; Hawaiʻi's Thousand Friends, public trust doctrine explainer.

Assessment (100 points)

Grading Scale

UH Mānoa uses plus/minus grading; percentages below apply to the 100-point total above.

Course Calendar (Fall 2026)

AI Policy

CBA requires students to defend every judgment call: what counts, what gets valued, and whose perspective sets the discount rate. Students are expected to hold AI to the same standard. If a student cannot explain and defend a claim, a number, or an argument independently, it should not be submitted under that student's name.

Permitted: brainstorming and idea generation, explaining a concept the student is stuck on, checking spreadsheet formulas or code, editing a student's own draft for clarity and grammar, and summarizing background material the student has already read.

Not permitted: generating any part of a stage write-up, case notebook section, or final report; drafting analysis, arguments, or conclusions; or fabricating or verifying citations without independently checking the source. In-class work is hand-written and submitted on paper; AI has no role in that work by design.