You’ll find student discussion, organized by each week, about course readings for HIST 218: The United States since 1945
Week 13
During the 1960s and 70’s there was a considerable concern for environmental protection. Many concerned citizens feared that major American companies would violate the Wilderness Act of 1964. The wilderness act of 1964 was established to protect federal lands from being used for developing and using motorized vehicles. Many politicians took advantage of this concern…
Week 15 Post
Global warming has been a problem on Earth since the rise of the industrial revolution. Climate change is the long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns across the world. The research regarding global warming didn’t get started till the late 1890s. Humans contribute to global warming the most through the burning of fossil fuels and…
week 15: temporary pleasures > a safe future
The Kyoto Protocol came about at the convention for climate change that was being held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol was a treaty where any nation that signed it had to put in efforts to reduce their CO2 production. When this was presented, the Bush Sr.’s administration was in office. This week’s…
economics on a dying planet
In Joshua Howe’s book Behind the Curve, he speaks to why we are behind in the Keeling Curve both in political action and in the actual science of CO2. Back in 1958 scientist Charles Keeling investigated CO2 in our atmosphere leading to the Keeling curve. As stated by Howe, “The Keeling Curve represents the measured…
Week 15 Post
There were several reasons why the Bush Sr. administration was hesitant to sign the Kyoto Protocol. One of the main concerns was the potential economic impact of the agreement. The Kyoto Protocol would have required industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a certain percentage below their 1990 levels, which would have required…
Climate Change
I am going to start off with some background information about the article. Starting in 1958, CO2 emissions have been tracked in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Years later, they will track CO2 levels in Antarctica. The records show an exponential increase in CO2 emissions every single year. This leads to the overall increase in temperature of…
Blogpost #12
According to the reading, the George H.W. Bush administration was hesitant to sign the Kyoto Protocol due to the fact that there was extensive disagreement on what responsibilities and emissions targets that the United States should have been reaching (Howe, 2014). To be specific, the reading on page 187 says, “In the United States, the…
US resistance to climate policy
The reasons behind the Bush Sr. administration’s hesitancy to sign the Kyoto Protocol are complex, but they can be boiled down to a few key factors. One reason was concern about the economic impact of the agreement. The Kyoto Protocol required endorsers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to specific targets, which would require significant…
And at the bottom of the U.S. priority list: climate change
As science became the mainstream way to talk about climate change, it also led to a rise of using science to refute the idea that people should have to change their ways of living in the name of environmentalism. It is true that a focus on the science of climate change allowed scientists access to…
Is the U.S. setting the Earth on Fire?
The Bush Sr. administration was hesitant to sign the Kyoto Protocol because they felt they would feel the burden of the responsibility more so than other countries. Despite science proving that change would need to be made, the Bush Sr. administration was more fearful of the possible negative economic consequences than the environmental consequences. Following…
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Will Wright 
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