We started off class with a costume contest – everyone who participated had great costumes ranging from Fra Luca Pacioli to characters from the Lorax (photos to be posted soon!). Robbie Twells claimed to have a Pope Francis costume but never followed through on wearing it to class.
Emil Dimantchev helped walk us through the En-ROADS Climate Simulation (which stands for Energy – Rapid Overview and Decision-Support). En-ROADS is a simulation tool that allows participants to understand how to achieve climate goals through changes in energy usage, consumption, and policies. En-ROADS focuses specifically on changes in GDP, energy efficiency, R&D results, carbon price, fuel mix, and how these factors effect carbon emissions, energy access, and temperature.
In class we were broken up into four groups: think tank 1, think tank 2, energy company, and non-profit. Our goal was get the total change in global warming under 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. This objective proved to be much harder than we anticipated. I was a part of the non-profit group. Our approach to solving this problem was to make reasonable adjustments and policies that were somewhat realistic in being passed. In order to reduce the overall change in global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 we had to make a lot of small changes to various policies. What we came to discover was that reducing global warming by the first degree was significantly easier than getting it to 2 degrees from 3 degrees. Additionally, we learned that New Technologies are still so far in the future that they don’t impact the world (negatively or positively) any time soon.
Overall this was a very eye opening and humbling experience. the En-ROADS simulation allowed us to experience first hand the frustrations with trying to mitigate global warming and how difficult it is. Thank you again Emil for coming in and teaching class again today!
Maddy Lee ’18
