<p>I want to be involved with sustainabilty, or any typ of environmental work. Now the schools I am looking at are only offering chemical engineering or civil engineering (with some environmental based courses). What major should I choose?! </p>
<p>I do not really care about the salary for future jobs, but I want to work with creating a more energy effiecient society or work withy some kind of prevention on pollution etc.</p>
<p>Many kinds of engineering have subareas applicable to energy efficiency or environmental protection.</p>
<p>Chemical or Materials: researching chemicals and materials which allow less consumption of resources or generating less pollution in producing compared to existing chemicals and materials
Civil: design of buildings and infrastructure which are energy efficient, reduce waste, improve reuse and recycling, etc…
Electrical: “clean” electricity generation and distribution
Mechanical: design of energy efficient and less polluting machines
Nuclear: fairly obvious, if you favor nuclear power
Computer Science: design of computers and software for all of these applications (buildings, electricity generation and distribution, machines, nuclear power plants, etc.)</p>
<p>To some extent, all engineering is concerned with reducing resource consumption (at least within the company or organization), because wasteful use of resources means wasting money, and engineers typically have to do their work under cost constraints. (However, pollution may be another matter, if the company or organization has insufficient incentive to avoid creating the negative externality that is pollution.)</p>
<p>Of course, this does not necessarily mean that there are a lot of job and career opportunities in the “environmental” subarea of each field.</p>
<p>ChemE, Environmental Engineering, EE</p>