- The WikiLeaks article was a little confusing to me, but I did my best to dissect the article to get the main points out. Looking at my diagram, it starts with the green boxes, then the blue, then either red or yellow, then the purple boxes, and it ends back up at the blue box. This article describes how the whole problem originated with an increasing release of greenhouse emissions due to fossil fuels and other things that are bad for the environment. All of these things are coming together to create climate change throughout the world. In order to fix this, the UN had a convention for climate change, and there was the creation of Copenhagen Accord plan. The goal of this plan was to help with climate change, and reduce the amount of greenhouse emissions. The US was in favor of this plan, but not many other countries were. The US needed allies with them to be in favor of this plan so they started secretly negotiating that included threats, hacking, and more. Eventually the information was leaked and there was distraught brought on by the other countries. They demanded a large amount of money in order to be in favor of this plan. Since the US was focused on getting their way, they paid the large amounts of money to the countries. Once the US did this, then those countries would be in favor of the Copenhagen Accord plan. In total, there were 146 countries that were going to be in favor of the plan, as well as 26 countries that had the intention of joining. All in all, the US bribed these countries to be in favor of the Copenhagen Accord plan so that green house emissions could be reduced, and climate change could hopefully be reduced as well.
- In my opinion, I do not think that the United States went about this issue correctly. In this class we have discussed the concept of ethics, and I believe that what occurred was unethical. The US was just focused on creating their end means that they did not care about the route taken to get there. I understand that greenhouse emissions and climate change is a serious problem, but I do not think they went about this the right way. I also do not think that the negotiating should have been leaked. There are a lot of foreign affairs go on that most of the world does not know about. These negotiations or whatever else goes on should be kept private, and between the parties involved. On the same note, climate change is a collective action problem. All of the countries that eventually were in favor of the Copenhagen Accord plan are contributing to climate change. If together each country owned up for their contribution to this issue, a change could have been made. Instead, United States was worrying about themselves, and switched the problem from collective action to individual action. They did this by only being concerned about what they wanted, and tried to solve the problem on their own when in fact a lot of other parties should have been involved. I don’t think that the United States should have been conducting the climate change diplomacy in the way that it did. But I also do not think that there is a simple solution. There are many different countries involved in this problem, and until the UN has a better solution to come up with it, I think this is where our world will remain. Every participant in the UN should be in some type of agreement of a plan to follow in order to fix this ongoing problem of climate change.
2 thoughts on “Ethics on the US Actions”
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Hi Madison, my name is Cassie and this is the link to my post: http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/04/07/climate-change-cassie-hess/. I agree with you that the article was quite confusing at first. I like the way you divided certain things in to categories using colors, it made it very helpful when trying to understand your diagram. I also agree that the United States has not been handling the issue of climate change very well. I also discussed in my post how the United States is acting more in its own self interest rather than of the interest of the entire world. We need to own up to the damage we have caused if there will ever be a solution to this problem.
Madison, I also related the WikiLeaks to ethics. I do not think what they did to the smaller countries was ethical. they asserted their dominance by persuading them with money, threatening them to not fund countries any longer, as well as spying on them. I do not think this was ethical or necessary for the United States to do this and believe them could have worked out a treaty without going to these measures. I also agree that Climate Change is a collective action problem and we all need to work together to solve the issue. Check out my post http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/04/07/douglas-apple-module-9/ and you can see my diagram as well as how I think the US should have handled the situation.