Module 9 – Ryan Gebhardt

 

Untitled drawing (1)

When creating my diagram, I decided the most obvious and necessary block of text to include is Climate Change. Since climate change is the core of this issue, I also added three text boxes (in red) of three major contributors towards global warming. These three are methane emissions from agriculture, greenhouse gases that are produced by burning fossil fuels, and carbon emissions stemming from vehicle use. From Climate Change I connected the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, whose central issue was quite clearly climate change. During this meeting, countries from across the world came together to discuss this issue. From there I connected the summit to three more blocks, one of them being the Copenhagen Accord. The US was among the countries that wanted to institute an accord that outlines practices that slow or reverse the pollution tainting our planet. While the US plan would hurt the economies all countries involved to varying degrees, developing countries would feel the brunt of the plan. This made it undesirable for these less-well-off countries who need an industrial economy to become competitive with other nations. Along with this I attached “US seeks intelligence” since the US was trying to get more information to press their accord and I also attached the fact that the Beijing talks hadn’t lead to a deal either. Those combine at my second to last box, the fact that the US hadn’t acquired enough popular support from other countries to enact their accord. As a result of this, the US used its vast intelligence network to try and bully other countries into the deal.

I personally believe that the leaking of this information is very important since it adds a level of accountability to our representatives who act on our behalf. The US government is clearly the most powerful in the world at the moment, having access to bleeding edge technologies and the best and brightest at their disposal. To let this power go constantly unchecked can lead to abuse like what we have seen. The use of spying and threats to bully smaller countries into agreeing with us is very unlike the values the American government is supposed to uphold. Since we live in an international society today, we can’t accept blackmail and extortion as viable negotiation tactics. As strongly as I feel that we need to address climate change, we need to do it in a manner that respects other countries’ privacy and their view points. Convincing a whole country to adopt a policy that might not directly benefit them is tough, but it should be done legally and with proper discourse, not with shadow games and threats.

One thought on “Module 9 – Ryan Gebhardt

  1. Hi Ryan,
    I think you did a really nice job with your diagram – color-coding is always a good choice and makes it easy to read. I also agree that the use of threats and spies is not representative of our government and that we need to change our ways of negotiation.
    Rachel
    You can check out my blog here: https://wp.me/p3RCAy-eoW

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