Journal #7

Respond to this statement:
"The United States has a 15,000,000,000,000 ($15 trillion) economy. According to calculations by Sachs, all countries need to quickly begin spending 1% of their annual GDP in order to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The 1% will be spent in an effort to begin cutting emissions now—closing the faucet—until we reach the 80% reduction needed by 2050. Our efforts will be in vain if America does this and other countries don’t follow.
Note (food for thought):
We give 1.3 billion dollars annually in military aid to Egypt and another 200+million in economy aid. 2 degrees warming offers no guarantee that we can avoid runaway warming—it only affords us a reasonably good chance.
1% of our GDP amounts to $150 billion annually. I personally would like to see us spend 2-3% in order to error on the side of caution. We currently spend: $738 on national defense, $738 billion on Social Security, $251 on debt service to the national debt, and $779 billion on Medicare and Medicaid. As a society, we spend more on healthcare than just what the government spends—somewhere between 16-19% of our total GDP goes to healthcare. This is in stark contrast to all the other industrialized countries which spend between 6-12% of their total economy on healthcare and cover everyone. If you are interested in how other countries approach healthcare, I have provided anoptional video at the following link (56 mins. broken down into 5 chapters):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/view/
We need to cut spending by $700 billion to $1.3 trillion (the wide range is due to the level and timing of our economic recovery) to prevent the deficit from increasing too much beyond the 14 trillion dollars it is already at. At some point, the international bond market will no longer have confidence in the “full faith and credit” of the United States Government—the world’s most secure borrower—and begin charging us a risk premium for our borrowing. An event like this (Greece-like dilemma) will lead to the “red ink” rapidly spilling everywhere."




First off I would want the United States to stand up and take the lead to stop climate change, I think that it is a very, very unrealistic idea. I feel as though the United States has lost a lot of its ‘spine’. Yes, I do think that other countries would follow our lead if we did in fact take the lead but, honestly I just don’t see us doing it anytime time in the near future. I think that instead of nations waiting for us to step up they or another extremely influential nation should. Like if China stepped up they could easily influence other Asian nations, who make a lot of the products that people use worldwide. If this did happen other countries including, America would definitely take notice and make changes. They would for many different reasons, the main one being that we get a huge chunk of the goods that we use from Asian countries. If they made the change then we would almost be forced to make a change as well. For example, if the Asian nations passed a law saying that they would only trade with other countries who were vigorously taking steps to become more environmentally friendly then we would HAVE to become more environmentally friendly. If we didn’t many of the goods that we use on a daily basis would in turn become expensive and people would be freaking out, and the government would be force to initiate change.

I also think that politics are having a detrimental effect on making changes to becoming more eco-friendly. I feel as though politicians today don’t care about the people that they are serving. They are too busy fighting among themselves like third graders to see the devastating effect they are having. They are not here to help make the world a better place and but rather here to serve themselves. I think that for one politician’s should have limitations on how long they can serve for. By doing this we could easily eliminate people who are only politicians who care only about themselves and get ones that care about the people they serve and want to be able to represent them. Because a lot of them are there only to serve their own self interests. I think that future generations will not blame the common people, but rather blame government for global warming.

When it come to resolutions to the problem and figuring out exactly what parts of our GDP to take money out of to make changes, I think we should take it out of many different areas. The first place that it needs to be taken out of is government spending, and by this I mean take it out of the salaries of the people who hold different offices in the government. Such as senators, mayors, politicians, etc. They make way too much money. By lowering their salary only people who want to actually serve the people that they are representing will want to run for office. Next, we should take a small portion out of the military. Then take some out of Medicaid and Medicare, and then take a large amount of money that goes towards foreign aid. Hopefully by then we will have taken out at least one percent out of our GDP.I definitely don’t think we need to even touch the money that is going into education. (If anything it needs to be dramatically increased!)