Summary

I really feel I gained a lot from the lectures about the climate change, especially from the second lecture. So, I am going to mainly summarize the second lecture.
It basically gives us an overview of the political and social approaches to the climate change problems, which is not that scary as the daunting statistics but teaches us something practical and doable by the individuals, like ourselves live in this world.
The first part of the lecture gives us an overview of the climate change conundrum, both in a historical and contemporary perspective. In the past or maybe just a few decades before, the leading emitters in the world are predominated by the western countries, that is, developed countries, such as the United States and countries in Europe. However, in today’s context, companying the soaring of the eastern countries, more and more countries especially those in Asia are gaining more weight in the affairs of carbon emissions and climate change. China has outran the United States to be the world’s largest carbon emitter; India will also soon catch up with its huge economy and fast industrializing pace. If other countries like Malaysia, Indonesia in Asia keep developing economy without properly taking care of the environmental issues, Asia would soon be dominating in carbon emission. Nonetheless, the carbon emission per capita in developed world is still considerably high than that in developing world.
Secondly, we need strong governmental or institutional approaches to tackle this problem. The government can invest in clean energy; transform the energy structure, increasing the clean energy portion; Tax the roads or vehicles to control the numbers of cars, or like Mexico City where rules that there is a particular day in a week on which you cannot drive your cars; government can also extend the responsibility of the producers on their products as European Union does.
Lastly, it comes to the individual responsibility. Although maybe one’s efforts seem quite minor in combating climate change, as long as we can do it together, it actually a very powerful force to fight the climate change. We can choose to eat less meat or eat meat that is home-grown, since meat is actually very carbon intensive and by eating home-grown food, we can decrease the carbon emission caused by the transportations in carrying those meat from far abroad.
To conclude, the climate change issue has been a problem we have to focus on and we can do much to help. If everyone can do a small part, we are absolutely able to achieve the goal of containing the climate change in an acceptable range.