At the start of the quarter, you were asked for your initial thoughts on two critical policy questions:
A) What amount of warming should be our policy goal (1.5, 2, or 3C)?
B) What would be the most effective personal action for you to take in support of this goal? Specifically, allocate 100 points among the following options, given the following constraints: (i) You must allocate all 100 points (with the most points indicating the highest priority); (ii) You must allocate points to four different categories (i.e., you can’t allocate to fewer than four, and you can’t allocate to more than four); (iii) The minimum allocation that you can make to an individual category is 10 points.:
Daily energy behaviors (e.g., driving less, using less electricity and heat)
Daily dietary behaviors (e.g., eating less meat, eating only local food)
Larger lifestyle choices (e.g., eliminating flying, moving to a location that enables minimum impact)
Very large lifestyle choices (e.g., number of children)
Making sure big purchases are efficient/low emitting (e.g,. car, efficient windows and roof on house, solar panels, etc)
Political activism within government process (e.g., candidates, legislation, ballot measures, prioritizing public investment in solutions)
Political activism outside government process (e.g., divestment campaigns, activist investing, occupying/disrupting pipelines/coal-fired power plants/etc)
Devote career choice to climate action (litigation, finance, technology development, public sector, research)
For each of these questions (each question will be graded on a scale from 0-10), describe your current position, which may be the same or different than your initial answers. Whereas in the first week you were asked to briefly summarize your justification, now we would like to see a more complete justification of your choices, reflecting on the material you learned in class (see rubric below for how we will grade the reports). Specific aspects you may wish to consider:
i) The total costs and benefits of actions needed to reach a certain target.
ii) The distribution of these costs and benefits across different countries, and different members of society within countries.
iii) For specific actions on greenhouse gas emissions, are there other outcomes (often called “co-benefits” or “hidden costs”) that you care about that are not captured in normal cost-benefit calculations (e.g. nature, health, conflict, etc.)?
iv) If your position has changed, why has it changed?
The full report should be between 2 and 5 pages, although going over because of references or figures is ok.
