Network Effects on The Climate Crisis
When approached from a scientific perspective, the climate crisis can be a relatively simple issue. Global temperatures are rising, which is followed by rising sea levels, increased storm activity, mass extinction, and many other adverse effects. A large majority of this can be attributed to emissions, pollution, and other human activity. Naturally, when it comes to trying to develop solutions, the climate crisis becomes a lot more complex. This can largely be attributed to network effects, namely positive and negative externalities.
As discussed in class, externalities are any situations where an individual is indirectly affected by the actions of other individuals. One example of a negative externality in this context would be pollution. This is “a cost that individuals and companies impose on other people without paying the price themselves”[1]. To counteract this negative externality, governments often impose a tax or fee for those that release large amounts of emissions to dissuade them from doing so and regulate it in some way.
The climate crisis is also characterized by positive externalities. For example, one step towards a greener future involves a switch to electric cars. If these new electric cars are not valued highly by the general public, producers will make fewer cars, and there will therefore be less infrastructure to support them. Without infrastructure, such as public electric car chargers, these products can very quickly become irrelevant or obsolete. The more people that are interested in electric cars, the more electric cars and infrastructure will be created, and the more positive benefits users will receive. Therefore, each consumer that purchases an electric car has a positive externality on other consumers.
This can be widely applied to the general topic of climate change. The more people care about the climate crisis, the more technology will be created to resolve this issue, and the more people will buy this technology. Each person that cares about the climate crisis enough to make a change acts as a positive externality on all other consumers that care about this issue, because the more people stand up and make changes, the easier it will become and the more of an effect it will have.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/opinion/biden-climate-change-ira.html