Discuss whether or not it was a good idea for Donald Trump to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords. This would allow us to address the tension between the needs and interests of individual businesses and national economies and the needs and interests of global humanity. Obviously individual nations and businesses belong to that global humanity, but the question of how to enter into a global agreement to fight climate change while still sustaining the conditions of profitability is a very complicated and arguably impossible one, i.e. it may be that capitalism is not capable of responding to this threat. So there are a whole range of issues we could discuss.
I also thought this would be the best way for each of you to get to talk about what interested you – you wouldn’t have very much space in your one page paper, to be sure, but for your final paper, you could then discuss the particular mode of fighting climate change that was most interesting to you, i.e. carbon capture, sustainable energy, solar radiation management, and so forth. I’d also be happy to talk to any of you individually about your interests.
Let me know what you think, and here are the articles I’d propose posting on Sakai. So you’d be basing your paper on these, and then doing additional research to support your argument.
Here’s an article reporting on the decision:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-announce-us-will-exit-paris-climate-deal/2017/06/01/fbcb0196-46da-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html?utm_term=.0f5c47594c0f&tid=a_inl_manual
