Globalization and the Environment

Environmental Protection Efforts Environmental protection takes a number of different forms. Usually, laws are required to motivate businesses and people to reduce pollution or otherwise protect the environment. Climate change represents a much bigger challenge, however, than protecting any one given aspect of the environment. Because it affects the planet's ability to sustain life -- or ours at least -- climate change represents a challenge. It has been created by billions of us and affects us all.

But motivating individual action to preserve the environment that sustains is cannot be done through laws and punishment. First, we are all guilty, and second such a system is far too slow to be effective. The international community has proposed carbon credits and the trading of such credits as a means of changing behavior. Nations that perform well can trade credits with other nations. Then, nations would try to improve their performance by encouraging changes within their borders, for example by creating their own economic incentives and carbon credit schemes.

This has the best potential to change human actions. It is not a perfect system by any means. In particular, setting a level of allowable climate change is actually kind of silly, because of the consequences of missing such a target. But this carbon credit system is a starting point, because it encourages anybody by means of financial interest to change their behavior. Admittedly, it seems odd that financial incentives are what I feel will be the most effective.

People probably should respond to the existential threat that climate change poses for the species, or at least the threat is poses to our lifestyles. Adopting changes willingly allows us to exert control over those changes, and at the very least retain the elements of lifestyle we would like to retain. Allowing climate change to simply occur will take the decisions about what lifestyle elements will remain -- how comfortable our lives will be in a hot climate world -- out of our hands.

One would think this would be sufficient motivation, but people in power don't think that way. Money and short-term motivations are more important. Perhaps older people don't worry about it because they think they will be long dead before things get really bad, and that is why financial incentives are important to spur smarter thinking. Still, and however odd the reasoning why other methods look like they will be less effective, the adage about money talking is true.

Globalization has brought about an international system where people in general are better equipped to see how interconnected our world really is. Mentally, I think this helps, but with respect to actually executing on ideas, globalization can also help. Nations regularly meet with each other, and work with each other.

It is unfortunate that the most powerful nations are also among the most in denial about the risks to the environment, but ultimately the other nations have some power to work together, and through many of the institutions of globalization they also have the platform to do so as well. Thus, I believe that the international community will be able to work together.

How and when this motivation arrives is not known yet, but the channels of communication exist that nations can agree to pursue common goals -- that these goals are not already self-evident may surprise but at least we know that when people are sufficiently motivated to take action that they have the means by which to do so. However, there is also a.