The first speaker, Professor Palmer, gave us facts on the severe trend of global warming. Furthermore, he introduced some technically effective responses to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air at 500ppm, including ocean storage and changing the fuel source from coal to gas, nuclear or solar energy system. Last but not least, Professor Palmer questioned on whether or not these remedies will eventually be implemented. He mentioned political factors that politicians tend to focus on short-term problems first and will not pay sufficient attention to the consequences to climate change. Moreover, Professor Palmer compared other issues, such as 18 children die of hunger and communicable diseases every day, to climate change, points out that technically possible solutions might not practically help us tackle the problems we are facing.
The second speaker, Dr. Sovacool, introduced to us STS methods, together with two case studies as examples. He first brought up the case of adopting a new kind of energy. Further, he detailedly analyzed non-technical challenges: market failures and barriers, political and regulatory obstacles and culture and behavioral challenges. After this came the second case as regard of the failure of the electrical vehicle when it was first invented. He listed out factors such as technical factor, economic factor, political factor and social and cultural factors. In brief, Dr. Sovacool emphasized that STS methods can provide useful guidelines to evaluate a new technology.
Last was Associate Professor Pala, who primarily emphasized on Assessment and Mitigation of Climate Change. He described potential consequences of climate change: increased sea levels, droughts and floods, extinctions, intense hurricanes, disease and social and economic disruption. Moreover, he introduced some resolutions based on energy efficiency, renewable energy resources, gas emissions and government policies. Apart from above, difficulties of implementation of the resolutions were mentioned by Pala: the actions to be taken are global and involve long-term political issues and the changes made will disrupt economies and lifestyles. In the end, Pala briefly described the roles governments should take in terms of climate change and also the things every living individual should do to better the climate.
Through the lecture, what captured my attention is the connection between climate change and the politics and society. Apparently, based on the remedies mentioned by Palmer and Pala, the difficulties in implementing resolutions are more involved with politics than involved with technology. At this point, I do agree with STS methods introduced by Dr. Sovacool. In order to successfully introduce a new technology to the society, political and social factors must be well considered. Just as the electrical vehicle was outweighed by gasoline vehicles in the second case of Dr. Sovacool’s lecture, perhaps the current methods solving climate change causes too many inconveniences and sacrifices in other aspects of human activities.
Furthermore, Climate change is a global issue, and requires government of all nations to co-operate. However, every government has short-term problems arose from its country to handle, such as increasing rate of unemployment due to economic recession. As many kinds of short-term issues that draw the attention from the governments, politicians are more apt to focus on the present problems. That’s why the society and politicians do not treat it as the most prior problem. Therefore, climate change is a serious one indeed, however, in comparison to other existing problems human being are facing, it is just one of those many serious problems human being are facing.
