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These simulations are related to how extreme and negative our impact is. Being that many of us are wealthy, and often materialistic, in this day and age, we have enormous environmental impacts. Sometimes, it seems the people with the worst impact do the least to combat the problem. The only part of the simulations which seemed irrelevant was some of the questions about house size, electrical use and such. Those were aspects we had less influence or knowledge on. The other one was related because even when we don’t realize it, the government is a major contributor of our views and actions towards global climate change. When we thought of government, we thought debates, laws, and taxes, we didn’t consider the results and importance of the party’s view on climate change. Plus, we don’t really think as a young person about global conferences but our decisions, even for a fairly small continent had great impacts on other countries thought on me, and possibly, their decisions on policies or agreements in the future.
The simulations provided a perspective on what affects the environment and the impact our choices would have on the world. The first simulation gave us a good estimate of the resources we needed, and which areas of our needs were impacting the planet the most. For example, the simulation displayed a numbered pie chart showing how much working land we needed to support our lifestyles, and which needs required the most amount of land. Likewise, our transportation requirements contributed a lot to the total amount of working land we needed, due to the fact we drive everywhere. With this knowledge, we can understand which parts of our lives we should attempt to change. Thus, we can effectively develop solutions to combat our carbon footprint- in this case, we decided that we would walk home from school every other day. The second simulation was a lot less relevant to our personal lives context, but it did, again, provide an important perspective- one of a world leader’s. This simulation helped me to understand what types of decisions and policies would have to be made on a national scale to combat CO2 emissions. As well, we didn’t fully realize the amount of work it took to consider which policies to implement- especially when it came to considering public approval. THe simulation required us to pick policies that were favoured, in order to keep political stability. As citizens, we see how our opinions can make a difference, even in the crowd of many others. Forming concrete ideas/opinions allows one to have an active voice in the government's.
Before we did this, we never really thought to assign responsibility to a certain person or group. On the contrary, we didn’t think that it was fair to make laws forcing people to change or limit their behaviour. It is a good idea, in our opinion, to teach people how great their impact is, similar to how the first site showed if everyone lived like us how many earths we’d need to supply the resources. Or, it really helped when it told us our footprint compared to others in our city or country. Next, because business owners make their living in that way, we find it unfair to force them to pay income or money that could be put toward salaries just for producing greenhouse gases. It is equally the consumers who might purchase badly polluting products or goods from badly polluting factories. These simulations changed a lot in our ways of thinking, for example one of the options to reduce CO2 emissions was to plant trees that could absorb carbon dioxide. That thought never occurred to us, and we also think that forests like these could help with other issues like pollution and preservation of ecosystems. If we plant trees for this reason and then preserve them, ecosystems can be built within them and could not be bothered. This idea however would probably not have enough impact to get rid of all of the CO2 emissions in our atmosphere. However, we believe that this is a good first step for kids our age, as well as a way to inform others who may not be aware of the issue.
How do these simulations reflect the effect the public has on political decisions?
While MinJee took a more moderate path, to please the audience, I took a sided approach. Minjee said that through these simulations, you can see how being moderate, and centered gets you a lot of approval from the public, because you’re doing what the public wants to hear. The decisions might not have helped to change an environmental or financial crisis as much as being one-sided over another, but when the public was approving the moderate choices I made, I noticed that it was really difficult to make good, and effective decisions. The times when I decided on an idea that would benefit in the future, I was frustrated as I kept on seeing the public rage over the decisions that didn’t immediately benefit. The same principle lies in real life too, but especially, even more with media being implemented as the main source of news for most people in today’s generation.
On the other hand of MinJee, I took a narrowed approach following our political opinion. This ended up ‘leaving the economy in ruins’ and almost completely wrecking the environment all to protect the coal industry and businesses, reduce taxes and put minimal restrictions on citizens. In the end, both ways didn’t please the people so I can understand how the government struggles in real life.
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1 Comment(s)
This is a really excellent analysis of the simulations! I really like how you considered the different paths available to you in the scenarios and how important each decision was in the resulting outcome.
I think your idea of encouraging positive rather than negative action on climate change is a really good one - for example, encouraging businesses to plant trees to absorb CO2 directly rather than taxation so the government can do the same thing. A lot of research suggests that people are more likely to agree with climate action if they can directly see the results of their work and that what they are doing has a positive effect - therefore being given a positive task like tree planting is far more likely to encourage people and companies to get involved.
I also think that you're right on how hard it is for government to balance pleasing the people who can vote them out of office right now, vs doing what is necessary for long-term sustainability. One of the most effective strategies that is being used to appeal to people who might be resistant to climate change action right now is to appeal to social norms - convincing people that other people around them consider certain behaviours undesirable makes them more likely to not do them. One of the most effective examples of this is smoking - it used to be acceptable to smoke everywhere, and when anti-smoking laws were initially enforced they were unpopular, but now that smoking is seen as socially undesirable the public supports stronger anti-smoking laws. What sort of campaigns do you think might be effective in convincing the public of the importance of climate change action? Do you think this will differ between cities/countries?
Beth
Beth Richardson
Sep 18, 2016