Summary and My Take-away

My understanding of a global issue, climate change, has been broadened by 3 distinguished speakers on 30^th January 2009. After watching the video “The Inconvenient Truth”, I understood how the world is suffering from climate change and global warming. However, after listening from the perspectives of the speakers, my thoughts deepen about certain measures and implementations that we can take to counter climate change.

The first speaker, Professor Andrew Palmer, from the Centre of Offshore Research and Engineering spoke about the technology and politics of carbon dioxide capture and storage. He started off by explaining the effects of a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, about its nature and effects on earth such as absorbing infrared radiation from the sun and traps the heat in the earth’s atmosphere. He then touched on the response to climate change. One example would be switching to alternative energy sources (renewable resources, bio fuel, solar, nuclear). He also talked about measures that the UK government could take to mitigate global warming such as to tax petrol heavily. He then touched on the processes of carbon capture technology and its pros and cons. He added the political views of the technology and explained why it has not been widely implemented yet.

The second speaker was Associate Professor Benjamin K. Sovacool from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He talked about using Science & Technology System (STS) to address energy and technological problems. He started off by highlighting the traditional analysis of technology. He then elaborated more on the 4 kinds of determinisms; structural, autonomous, consequential and normative determinism. He suggested that a technological problem will never be a simple technological problem alone. He went on explaining about the factors contributed to technological problems such as political and regulatory obstacles, cultural and behavioural challenges, technical challenges, economic challenges, political challenges and social/cultural challenges. He ended off with a conclusion of how STS methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technologies.

The third and final speaker was Dr Rajasekhar Bala. The main key point of his speech was the difficulties in dealing with global climate change. He talked about earth’s natural greenhouse effect and the consequences of enhanced greenhouse effects (global warming). He showed evidence of global warming and a simplified model on how to determine average temperature and greenhouse gases content on earth’s atmosphere. He also explained the possible effects of a warmer earth and suggested mitigation measures to counter global warming. He ended with the explanation about the difficulties in dealing with climate change and showed a slide of what we can do to reduce carbon dioxide emission.

In my point of view, all the speakers came to one conclusion which is, politics hinders technological advancement that can mitigate climate change. One good example would be the suggestion of changing to alternative energy such as nuclear power. Not only has it caused to a rise in political problems, it also deemed as unethical eventhough it is for a good cause. Another example would be carbon capture and storage technology. Some governments oppose the idea due to political and economical reasons although it is technically feasible. Therefore, I conclude that climate change will always be global problem unless everyone around the world comes to their consensus to mitigate it.