Tuesday afternoon, a small crowd gathered in the Browsing Room of the Knight Library to hear a University professor discuss the effects of climate regulation at different levels of government.
The lecture, titled “Is Climate Change an International Legal Problem?,” was sponsored by the international studies program and focused on climate change and its relationship to legal issues around the world.
Professor Hari Osofsky gave a 45-minute speech based on her extensive research on the topic, followed by response from University geography professor Alexander Murphy. The floor was then opened up to the audience to discuss the topic with both Osofsky and Murphy.
One of the topics Osofsky addressed was the necessity of allowing local governments to have some control over climate regulations. Generally, the litigation of control of pollution begins at a national or international government level, forcing local and regional governments to conform to policies that the higher government has put into place. This is called “top-down” regulation, Osofsky said.
Multi-tiered climate regulation is vital to the process of slowing global warming and climate change on an international level. Osofsky said transportation is one area where people can make daily choices to help regulate emissions, but in many locations, local governments have little control over such issues.
Sean Courtman, a sophomore computer science major at Lane Community College, attended the speech Tuesday. He said Osofsky and her supporters have “the right idea in seeking to connect local application with national application,” referring to the ideas of litigation by governments.
“A lot of climate change litigation only happens because advocacy groups beg for it – coalitions should be made between these advocacy groups and the government,” Courtman said.
Osofsky said “scaling up” is a dangerous approach in regulating climate control. “Even if we could create the ideal regime, I’m not convinced that a top-down approach will ever find a way of moving flexibly amongst these governments,” she said, speaking about the dangers of looking at climate change as a problem that needs to be looked at on an international level.
Osofsky also showed the audience a diagram of different levels of governments and the ideal way they should work with one another. She said she believes that different issues should be handled at different levels of government.
In conclusion of her speech, she reiterated a few cases in which members of the American government did not take issues of climate control seriously, or just seemed to show little or no interest in the regulation of climate control on a local level.
Murphy reiterated Osofsky’s point that although some higher-up governments say the “local level is too small to fix anything,” local control could actually be helpful in slowing climate change before it reaches a “tipping point” at which it becomes completely out of anyone’s control.
University sophomore and international studies major Katherine Philipson also attended the event.
“Climate change is obviously an important issue, and I like to hear as many perspectives as possible, it’s interesting to consider the interaction of local and national government,” she said.
Philipson said there is a group on Facebook called the UO Social Justice Network where students can post information on local political events. “What’s empowering is that if there is something we can do, as students, to make things happen, it’s an incentive for local actions,” she said.