1. me, the most surprising and interesting part of any of the videos was when Rebecca Henderson talked about China being able to absorb the externalities. In other words, for most countries, while it would be advantageous to the world for them to admit less fossil fuels, it is not worth to them alone the economic loss that they would take fully. We call the effect it would have had on the rest of the world an externality because it affects people who don’t make the decision. The idea is that for China, because their population is so large, they are really receiving a substantial poriton of the positive externality generated by switching to fossil fuels. And because of this, it does end up meaning that from a pure economic standpoint, many climate change policies are purely advantageous.
2. At some point in the interview with Dan Kamen, he talks about an individual's responsibility. Over the past few years, I’ve started to think about how if we really want to stop climate change, we are gonna have to make big moves. From that, I think that getting people to start changing their habits for climate change makes them less likely to want to put in effort to push for larger change (through protest, and voting, for example) because they feel like they’ve already done their part. I would have loved to see a question that asks about this, so something along the lines of “How important are individual habits in putting an end to climate change, and do they necessarily have a role to play at all?”
Zev, you bring up a great point on why China is so much more eager to address climate change. Severe air pollution obviously has serious adverse impacts on human health and by default the CCP has declared a war on air pollution and implemented a comprehensive government program to tackle it. Polluted air is obviously no good for business and because they can actually feel tangible effects among their population, they are more inclined to address it, unlike many in the United States.