Dickinson to Durban » Archive
Politics and Time
By: Anna McGinn ’14 Janet L. Sawin and William R. Moomaw’s report, “Renewable Revolution: Low Carbon Energy by2030,”offers quite a positive and uplifting assessment of the world’s situation as it pertains to climate change in the next twenty years. Actually, the tone was so encouraging that I started to question the legitimacy of some of the statements they make. But the difference between this article and most other research we have assessed on this topic is that the focus of this report is on what the world is doing well in regards to renewable energy, and not so much the degree to which it is failing. Yet, it makes the transition to renewable resources sound too easy. This report acknowledges the fact that policies are pivotal for their emission projections to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Carbon Markets, Climate Change
The Corporations Speak
By: Anna McGinn ’14 Reading industries’ and corporations’ take on climate change policy is an interesting perspective to dissect especially after reading IPCC and scientific documents. Their focus is not to describe the science of climate change or to create international agreements on GHG emissions. Rather their report, “Assessing U.S. Climate Policy Options: A report summarizing work at RFF as part of the inter-industry U.S. Climate Policy Forum,” explains how corporations would like the United States to approach climate change regulations. From page one, they focus on regulating GHG emissions through various market approaches. In the realm of corporations, everything has a dollar value. Further, they are careful to use non-committal language and are vague in their explanations of solutions. Despite some drawbacks, it seems impressive that these 23 corporations came … Read entire article »
Filed under: Carbon Markets, Climate Change
We Will Figure it out Next Year
The fact that the countries of the world come together every year for the Conference of the Parties (COP) to discuss and debate climate change is progress by itself. It is impressive that every year almost every nation sends delegate to this conference to confront together one of the largest challenges of our time in a peaceful manner. However, discussion is only the first step, and it seems that the global community is having a difficult time moving on to step two which is to take action. This struggle is reflected in most of the agreements that the COP comes to by the end of each conference. They restate what they agree on: climate change is occurring, and every nation needs to take some degree of responsibility for it. Then, … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change
Complexities of the Negotiations
The Climate Policy Simulation is an exercise created by Professor John Sterman at MIT to allow students to understand climate negotiations through actually attempting to negotiation for different countries. On Thursday, September 15, 2011, the Africa Mosaic students and one of Dickinson’s first year seminar classes came together to participate in these negotiations. Each student was to represent a nation state which was part of one of the three blocks (developed countries, rapidly developing countries, and other developing countries) involved in the talks. The students were not required to have a deep understanding of their country’s climate change policy; however, each student received an informational briefing on the negotiations from their respective block’s perspective prior to the negotiations. Over the course of three hours, the blocks debated with each other … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Mosaic Action
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