If climate change were whales we would help

This week was our climate policy and politics week and it was so interesting! I have always been fascinated with politics as it seems like such a mystery to me. First we had Jeff Anderson come to our class and he brought up examples of politics in our media and how we react as a nation. The first thing he talked about was a story of a whale that was caught somewhere in Alaska and how the media and everyone was so considered to go help this whale. He said a headline in the new read " If Bosnians were whales, we would help." We contemplated this for awhile and then changed Bosnians to climate change. To me this is a very powerful statement and exposes corruption among our nation and how we respond to things. I think about why and contemplate maybe it is urgency or the visual appearance of immediate danger. To society the whale was in immediate danger and they can see that, climate change isn't one thing one place immediate like that. Climate change is gradual, wide spread, and can't offer us a visual like the whale can. We also talked about 4 ideal environmental world views; market liberals, institutionalizes, bioenviromentalists, and social greens and how they play into climate change.

Today Matt Lindstrom came into our class and spoke about Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the commons". This is a metaphor for anything held in commons. Within the commons people are self-interested trying to maximize their benefits and profits. As we discussed solutions we talked about regulation, a top down command and control method. In terms of climate change this would be the solution of carbon taxes. A second solutions was privatization, so in terms of land putting fences up so the individual owning that area reaps all costs and benefits. A third solution is hybrid which would be cap and trade and climate markers. We experimented with these solutions by working in groups on hypothetical case studies. My group had CSBSJU parking regulations. Our top down solution was parking permits categorized by faculty,students, seniority, etc.. Our bottom up solution was for individuals to just understand and respect societal norms of seniors getting the best parking spots, out of respect first years just don't park up close. Our hybrid solution was a cap and trade type system where you purchase random parking passes and them sell your passes to the highest bidder. This activity was very interesting because as we progressed in case studies we implied these same ideas to climate change. An interesting case study was on rivers. If you have a huge chunk of land and split it in 4 equal square chunks and you have a river running through the middle. What if business A and that start of the river has cattle polluting the river that business B has a brewery that has a beautiful porch overlooking the river. A pollutes the river giving B a bad view. This  is called 3rd party effect where costs are pushed over to other resource users. This is the essence of climate change and why we need policy.