The burden on our generation: Dartmouth students talk about climate change

Dartmouth students are paying attention to whats happening at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, where more than 15,000 representatives from 192 countries are gathering to discuss climate change and negotiate to address climate change.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Dartmouth
• students
• climate change
• environment
• sustainability
• copenhagen
• cop15

[Treeboy13]

(Cont). China's private sector investment in clean energy nearly doubled America's, despite the US crushing in intellectual property ownership. America and Japan did all the inventing, but China manufactured, bought, and installed much more of it. Unfortunately, patents didn't equal clean energy profits (probably because of patent infringement in China...) and China walked off with those employment and revenue benefits. Makes me wish the US had emissions intensity reductions goals like China!

[Treeboy13]

Hi Folks. For anyone still viewing, I'm that student in the green shirt and I just finished a little economic model for a term paper here at Dartmouth entitled, "Profiting Off of a Low-Carbon Economy: Which Nations Will Win and Lose." I augmented a model jointly created by the UNEP and an American consulting firm with data on clean energy investments, patents, and Dow Jones Sustainability Index performance to try to determine who would capture the most of the $2.3 trillion clean energy market.

[eaglecloud10]

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[eaglecloud10]

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[Joeofiowa]

@iflax003

I agree that the national debt is also a burden on our generation (as for the economy, yes it's doing poorly at the moment, but we're still the richest country on the planet).

The fact that so many people lash out at the idea of climate change is evidence of the problem we face. In any other scientific field, 97% agreement among experts is essentially taken as fact. In this debate, though, people demonize the science because they don't like it's implications.

[Joeofiowa]

@Guaranteedfresh1

While I applaud your attempt to conduct a little of your own climate science, I assure you that the experts have taken those ideas into account. Yes, the climate has changed in the past, but the concern is that it is changing RAPIDLY now because humans are altering the carbon cycle. And yes, the sun is a driver of temperature change, but so is carbon dioxide. There is healthy debate over the magnitude of human interference, but make no mistake: more Co2 = more warming.

[Joeofiowa]

@eaglecloud10

Do not generalize young people. I have "thought through" it plenty. And I'd wager I have traveled and done research in the developing world more than you have. Fact is, China already has a larger renewable energy economy than we do. There are serious economists who project the developing world will be able to adopt renewables without the "dirty" stage we went through. We're falling behind if we DON'T incentivize clean technology. You want China to kick our ass at that too?

[Guaranteedfresh1]

ummm... climate change, all they do is talk about it with no real change, taxing carbon is not going to help climate change come on people wake the fuck up. During the med evil period wasn't the average temp way above what the norm is today. Take a little research into the Sun and you may just have your answer to climate change.

[iflax003]

I am not college educated, so I could be wrong but, isn't the burden on our generation the national debt and lack of an economy? The link i clicked to get here only showed "the burden on our generation" and once I saw it was about climate change I watched to try and learn more about climate change.

[eaglecloud10]

I am an untra liberal, and believe that climate change is real-but I do not to know to what extent we effect the climate or in which direction. What I do know, is that most of the world will use fossil fuels for another 100 years, and for America to put itself in a strategic disadvantage will not help anyone. Do you want us to cut our food production to the rest of the world? We could save lots of carbon credits if we did. You young people have good hearts, but your not thinking through it.