My flow chart is on the following page: https://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4463/2016/04/homework-1.pdf

Concerning the talk about environmental protocol, the United States decided to do many things that are morally wrong, to push their own agenda. The focus of the discussion was not “What can we do to reduce our negative impact on the environment?” The discussion became “What do we need to do to influence other countries to work towards our goals?” In this conference we decide to bribe other countries with funding for projects. People in the U.S. government hacked the computer of a U.S. citizen to send an email from his email account to deceive the person the email was sent to. Hacking the computer of an individual with the goal of using that computer to deceive the representatives of another country is wrong for multiple reasons. The United States also fell to the level of threatening the Ethiopian officials to gain their support in the matter. We also cut our aid to the countries of Bolivia and Ecuador because they were refusing to support us in this discussion. This is another example of an individual entity taking a collective action problem (global climate change) and being too selfish to make sacrifices to provide everyone with benefits. That being said, I understand countries bargaining for power, but when the representatives of a country stoop to a level in which they are doing things that they would put their citizens into jail for doing, that country is obviously going down the wrong path. Stooping to these levels during a discussion that is supposed to be based on mutually benefitting all current and future countries (by protecting the earth) — I just don’t understand the purpose of these actions in this context.

There are many benefits and many disadvantages to releasing information like this to the public. When releasing sensitive information, the government often decides if the information will be a danger to the public or not. If the United States got word that its databases were hacked by another country, this information would not be released to the public because it would likely cause mass panic. This is the reason for many of the government cover-ups we see today. In the case of the cables, the United States government likely did not have to worry about the danger to its people, but the information was not released anyway. Another thing to consider when releasing information to the public is how the information impacts the reputation of the government. This information was likely not expressed because it would have harmed the reputation of the government as it has been doing from the leaks. In this case, the people of the United States deserved to know what their government was doing, while representing them, but knowing would indirectly, negatively impact them by the reputation of their country. If the public knows this information, the world knows this information, and seeing the evils of a country only generates bad feelings toward that country. All of these points become a balancing act between the right of the people to know what their government is doing throughout the world, with the direct and indirect safety of the citizens. I can not personally decide which of these two things outweighs the other. I think the representatives working in that conference should have taken other, more honorable routes towards solving this issue. The money that they would have not spent on bribing other countries could easily have gone to fixing the issue itself or funding for advertisements to better promote topics we learned about in this unit, such as carbon offsetting or reducing our output of carbon.