Blog stage 7 - Climate leadership

In 2015 A major milestone towards renewable energy was achieved. An agreement known as the Paris agreement was signed which set the standard between 175 countries on how the path of renewable investment is going to occur. However with the new Trump administration we can no longer expect the U.S to take the leadership role in perusing renewable energy. So who will rise to that position? In the past several years china has been investing heavily on renewable's in order to reduce the dangerous levels of air pollution throughout the country. Although it still relies on fossil fuels, the country invested 102.9 billion in renewable energy in 2015 and plans to spend 360 billion to 2020. This investment will also create an approximately 13 million jobs in green energy which would eventually put china in a major competitive advantage for the manufacturing towards this growing industry. What we should take away from this is that we should be electing leaders that will support the change towards renewables so that we could in the long run remain competitive in the growing renewable industry. However one of the major setbacks is the huge influence oil companies have in our government which buy out congressmen to instead make laws that benefit them. I personally believe that interest groups should not be able to "donate" money to politicians in order to benefit their companies or there should be a restriction on the amount so that other competitive interest groups could also have a equal influence in our congressmen.

Blog stage 6

In my colleague's blog, "Free country" by Jessica pham, she talks about the reasons why we need free college. I personally agree with her on the issue, but giving free college to everyone won't come with the direct benifits most people think it will bring. For example if college was free to everyone the value of a degree will drop even more, requiring people to get even more advanced degrees in order to stay competitive on the job market. The main benifit of having a system with free college is to have a more knowledgeable society that's cable of understanding larger socioeconomic and govermental issues that currently face us today, and being able to make better progress to those issues like in most other first world countries with free higher education.