11/20/15
Eleanor Babcock
Environmental Politics

A common theme behind climate change is the policies which are created and applied in order to mitigate and adapt to our changing climate. This week in class, we were visited by two guest professors, Jeff Anderson from Peace Studies and Matt Lindstrom from Political Science to brief us on different approaches to environmental policy and politics. Matt Lindstrom broke us into groups in class and gave us a commonly shared resource and asked us to create policy and set regulations on that resource.

This policy exercise is important because it aided us in understanding the breakdown and the complications behind regulating a shared resource. Garrett Hardin wrote an environmentally themes piece called "The Tragedy of the Commons". It discussed how we cannot solely have technological fixes to better our resource distribution, we need changes of our actions stemming from morals and values in order to share our resources. Professor Lindstrom defined the "commons" as resources with open access and no regulations or ownership. These commons are used in everyone's self-interest, driven by decisions to maximize ones own benefits.

The major problem with our world is that our population is growing exponentially. This means that our commons must be distributed equally and conservatively so we do not use or destruct our resources. Our freedom of the commons must be limited. There are three levels of policy which can be placed on the commons. These are:
1)Regulation
2)Privitization
3)Hybrid (cap and trade)
These levels gave us a way of looking at the resource Dr. Lindstrom gave us in class for our policy exercise. My groups was given the common resource of lakes. We determined that lakes should be regulated based on counties. This was because we looked at how population varies and some lakes are more central to populations of people than others. We also regulated the use of these lakes by populations by creating a permit policy for lake use. This permit policy also binded users to other regulations such as fishing limits, boat use and invasive species policies.

These methods of environmental policy are applicable to climate change because our climate is a commons. Our atmosphere is a shared resource which cannot be privatized. This means that meetings like the UNFCCC are essential for regulating emissions and use of the atmosphere.