In your final paper, you have two tasks. First, you need to determine what level of carbon emissions are reasonable from a scientific perspective. The term “reasonable” is for you to define–some people may feel that carbon stabilization is required, others may be willing to accept a 2 degree change, some may think no emissions reductions are necessary, while others may want to see an absolute decrease in atmospheric carbon. I don’t care what you decide is reasonable, but you will have to argue why, from a scientific perspective, this is a reasonable target. If you think we shouldn’t cut CO2, then you will need to explain why some of the effects that people are concerned about are not really a problem, and back that position up with scientific evidence.Once you have determined where we need to go, you should explain how we can get there politically. For example, if you say we need to cut emissions in half, how can we move in that direction? Do we need an international treaty? Do we need carbon taxes? Given the difficulty that we had in the U.S. just trying to ratify Kyoto, or stay with Paris, how can we approach this larger goal? What are the constituencies we can mobilize that would be sympathetic to your position? This has to be feasible in a relatively imaginable political environment. For example, it seems highly unlikely that the current Congress is going to pass a climate bill, but it wouldn’t take a big shift to put one back on the table as the economy picks up steam and other political developments happen. But even then, it would not be fair to assume that Democrats would suddenly not care about US competitiveness vis-a-vis China. So you can assume that there would be a more sympathetic Congress, but not one that is fundamentally different from what we might expect. Think about discussions that you had during the role playing exercise, and see if that helps you to think about what various constituencies care about (though you will want to get more information about them, as some of the positions were tweaked for playability).Your solution needs to be of the correct scale to produce the results you said were necessary in the first section. For example, if you said that you need to cut emissions in half, then planting trees won’t do it, but if you said that we need to simply improve our energy intensity then maybe you’d be OK. Obviously, the more ambitious your cuts, the more difficult this part will be, but on the other hand you may have an easier time justifying the level that you think is reasonable, who knows.In a nutshell, you should first describe how much we need to reduce emissions to address climate change, and then describe how we can realistically make that happen.The paper should be between 7 and 9 pages, double spaced.Your paper will need in-text footnotes, and primary literature will be more convincing in the scientific section than web pages (but both will work). As always, the papers need in-text citations in a standard form. Among other things, standard form means that you can’t just make something up because you don’t know how to cite webpages.
