When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt fairly helpless. My role was developing countries, and we had no resources or money to contribute to reducing climate change. However, after negotiating our outlook got better, as we realized that there were various steps we could take to do our part since the other countries were willing to help us out with funding. Our group originally felt that we would be able to make the most impact if we drastically reduced our deforestation and increased afforestation. These ideas changed once we realized that even if we put 100% of our efforts into the forests, it didn’t contribute that much to decreasing the overall change in global climate. I think that it will be very difficult to cut emissions, but that it is something that can be done. Each country would have to focus a lot of their time and money to do this, though there are many people and countries who don’t believe that we should. The major costs and barriers to implementation come from protecting the forests, planting new forests, and especially from attempting to decrease the amount of CO2 released by each household in well developed countries such as the US. Change in the US can be catalyzed by passing legislation that significantly increases the restraints on corporate green house emissions.

Nate Ware

When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt that it would be difficult for all of the nations to come together to create a solution. Throughout the rounds we started out by trying to convince the other groups to do what we want, but as it evolved we began to make compromises and bargain to get what we want. My group did not change our ideas much, but we did change our peak year and reduction year to be sooner. We did this in order to prompt the US and China to raise their rate of reduction. I think the emissions can be reduced but it would be very difficult both to negotiate as well as just attempt in general. The major costs would be the creation of green technologies and barriers include the corrupt governments of the developing nations so the developed countries are less willing to donate. It would also take many years set up the programs to reduce the emissions. The proposals rely on countries stopping their emissions output which is much more difficult in reality than in theory. By offering incentives for greener living practices and making the citizens more aware of how soon the effects can be seen we can catalyze change in the US.