Global Warming Is a Social Problem

The main concern of the lecture is global warming. All of the three lectures have been concentrating on global warming, but from different point of views. The first speaker, Prof Palmer talked about the mechanism of how do greenhouse gases heat the earth, and then he moved on to talk about technologies of carbon capture and the influence of politics on technologies. The second speaker, Prof Sovacool, mainly focus on how to estimate technologies. He used two examples in order to show that political and economic factors must be taken into consideration when we estimate a technology, which is exactly the objective of STS. The last speaker, Dr Bala, talked about the evidence of global warming and the challenges of solving global warming. He also provides us some measures in response to global warming and climate change.
Among the three speakers, the second one, Prof Sovacool, stood in a rather different point of view from the other two in the discussion of global warming and climate change. I have never considered about the impacts of politics and economy in estimating a certain technology, or especially technologies on solving global warming. I have heard of many technologies before, in response to global warming, some of which sound really effective. However, I have never paid enough attention to the current situation of our fight against global warming. In fact, most of the technologies are not practical. They require a large amount of funds in order to apply it, which would cause more pressure on our economy, compared to global warming itself. China is a very good example. China has great potential in developing wind-based energy source. However, according to China’s national conditions, adopting wind-based energy source widely is unrealistic because that would cost much many and take a long time. Currently, China should focus on reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency, which is the most realistic and suitable option for China.