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June 2, 2024 2:02 AM

Can you reach net zero by 2050? Play the Climate game by the Financial Times
posted by chavenet (17 comments total)

Do you want to deal with methane now?
no, also yes
posted by HearHere at 2:26 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

See also: "Beecarbonize", a great little free game with the same goal of making decisions to decarbonise. It is available for free on steam (free download for pc & mac) as well as both android & ios app stores.

I had one attempt at playing through this financial times climate game, i reckon Beecarbonize is a better game. It gives you a little time to see the crises coming, and a little time to address them before they lock in irreversibly, instead of just whacking you with a somewhat arbitrary outcome after you make a choice.

When you play it on the harder difficulty and let things slip a little out of control, Beecarbonize really models the kind of ratcheting doom spiral of systemic ecosystem collapse where one crisis you don't quite address in time triggers more crises, and before you know it, you need to spend > 100% of all your industrial and technological output firefighting roiling crises, and you can't afford to do anything proactive.
posted by are-coral-made at 2:34 AM on June 2 [3 favorites]

one thing these games don't model realistically at all is that they grant you, the player, the role of some kind of global world dictator. you can unilaterally enact whole-world policies.

a more realistic simulation would be to make the game multiplayer, say with 100 players at once per game, and have it so that unless 75% of all players vote to enact the exact same policy, nothing happens, but time passes, and the existing industry & economy keeps running along full-pelt, producing emissions.
posted by are-coral-made at 2:42 AM on June 2 [21 favorites]

So, in my mind this is barely a game. In almost every scenario the best option is just to take the most drastic action. That is probably realistic, but it doesn't have the flavor of actually having to balance priorities.
posted by matkline at 2:50 AM on June 2 [6 favorites]

a more realistic simulation would be to make the game multiplayer, say with 100 players at once per game, and have it so that unless 75% of all players vote to enact the exact same policy, nothing happens, but time passes, and the existing industry & economy keeps running along full-pelt, producing emissions.

Wow this is terrifying. Probably totally correct, which makes it even more terrifying.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:59 AM on June 2 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of a game I played 30 years ago - Balance of the Planet, by Chris Crawford (who also did the excellent Balance of Power series). Not much has changed in the intervening 30 years - both games feature roughly the same choices and same predictions.

As others have pointed out, they also share the same flaw, in that you essentially play a dictator. The winning strategy is to use that dictatorial power to take drastic action. In Balance of the Planet, a quick win could be secured by focusing on taxing coal use out of existance and eliminating urban parking spaces, ignoring just about everything else. Which is probably not wrong, but ignores a lot of reality.
posted by penguinicity at 3:30 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

So, in my mind this is barely a game. In almost every scenario the best option is just to take the most drastic action. That is probably realistic, but it doesn't have the flavor of actually having to balance priorities.
posted by matkline at 2:50 AM

that is very realistic. there are also funny sounds to help you keep reading about the end of the world

what is unrealistic is the lack of an oil lobby doing its damndest to subvert every decision, and asking Africa to increase its plastic consumption tenfold to secure new markets for drilling products
posted by eustatic at 3:41 AM on June 2 [7 favorites]

ooh a fun game lets play.....need some more variables though

disinfo

resistance by bad actors including corrupting processes

national squabbling

politicians grandstanding

forum shopping by polluters and capital

fraud - straight up lying about activities - at micro and macro level

wars and disasters distracting from efforts

as things get worse reversion to superstition and jingoism to stymie efforts

feedback loops where we burn the seed corn to get warm

---

if this game was played with any seriousness in avoiding the cliff our species is about to hurl itself off:......

here's a game I'd like to see played . have a worldwide tax of 20% of GDP of every country of every cent earned on this planet, that went into renewables - solar, wind, and yes, nuclear - at scale. mandatory employment 20% of the worlds workforce to do so in 20 years to completely replace all fossil fuel use. massive appropriation of lands and capital to do this. the same way that WWII overrode national interests under wartime rules, have a supranational organization that can override and enforce this backed up with military force if necessary, and make examples of the first groups/entities that said no.

of course this would be disastrous global ecofascistic authoritarianism of the worst kind and subject to all that entails. plus it will scare capital. it will thus never happen. but if we actually don't want to have billion-scale dieoffs in the next century, it's the one of the only "reasonable" ways forward. I'm serious.
posted by lalochezia at 6:33 AM on June 2 [4 favorites]

So, in my mind this is barely a game. In almost every scenario the best option is just to take the most drastic action.

That's not true, there are some "dumb ideas" that will clearly get you punished, like going for a CO2 tax of $1000 per tonne as opposed to a more realistic $250 per tonne.

I didn't test them all but I'm sure "roads made of solar panels" and "mining lithium on mars" fall into that category, being a dumb waste of effort and money.

Democracy 2 (2007) and the rest of the series generally did a good job of modelling the political machinations required to push your agenda on your population. (Trailer) In the society they model, there are about 15 different "interest groups" who have different views of your roughly 100 policy positions. There are different population sizes of each interest group and different correlations of how they overlap - "focus groups" tend to help here, like we do in marketing, where we profile general "groups" to conceptualize how policies are going to affect them. For example, Parent + Motorist tend to be correlated, sending kids to school and extra-curricular activities means they spend a lot of time in their car and will hate any car unfriendly policies.

In the end it's all about figuring out what people really need, and giving them the bare minimum to keep them in your political half of the spectrum while you ram your agenda down their unwilling throats. Anything more than the bare minimum means you're wasting your leverage and you could have gone after climate more aggressively.
posted by xdvesper at 6:56 AM on June 2 [3 favorites]

if we actually don't want to have billion-scale dieoffs in the next century

Century? It feels more like “decade” to me. And also feels like it’s past any kind of “if” optionality.

The famous xkcd Earth Temperature Timeline was posted eight years ago. We’re still on the “current path”. We’re discussing “limiting warming to 1.5C” with a straight face, when we hit it last year and haven’t even gotten emissions to stop accelerating yet.

When people say “within a century”, I think that’s a mental shorthand for “it’s going to happen, but I won’t live to see it.” I don’t think it’s in the human psyche to be able to face being a member of the last generation of a society, until the society is already burned down in ruins in the rear view mirror.

You’re going to live to see it.
posted by notoriety public at 6:58 AM on June 2 [6 favorites]

I got 1.53ºC even taking the most drastic action at every step, except for insect protein, which I figured was a trap. All of my actions were accepted except the $1000/ton carbon tax. I had assumed that since I had already mandated an almost complete transition to electric vehicles that the price of petrol would no longer be relevant, but the game said it was too extreme and had to be scrapped.

What's remarkable to me is that at each step it was clear that the most drastic action was both the right move and completely politically infeasible in the real world. And yet even doing all that I still didn't quite keep warming below 1.5º. If the intent of the game was to underscore just how far removed political and business leaders are from reality when it comes to climate, then it succeeded.
posted by jedicus at 7:00 AM on June 2 [3 favorites]

Given the average reader of the financial times, I feel like the game's primary purpose is to make a little buzzing WRONG sound every time you pick the neoliberal option

I ve seen these policy modeling exercises presented as charts, and this article / game is a better way of communicating the policy options over 30 years than a chart
posted by eustatic at 7:51 AM on June 2 [3 favorites]

Also, the options reflect the Louisiana Climate Action Plan

So if history serves, if you try to implement any of this, the oil lobby will put their fascist labor bosses like Jeff Landry into the executive, and they will appoint their lobbyists and hunting buddies to all government positions, and delete your constitution
posted by eustatic at 7:58 AM on June 2 [1 favorite]

Sorry, Louisiana Climate Action Plan
https://thewaterinstitute.org/projects/louisiana-climate-initiatives-task-force
posted by eustatic at 8:00 AM on June 2 [1 favorite]

every time you pick the neoliberal option

"Set strict standards and let the market sort out the details", "Set a carbon tax and let the market sort out the details", "Hand out subsidies for clean-tech research and let the market sort out the details" are the neoliberal options though.
posted by Pyry at 8:04 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

as is so often the case, the only realistic solution is political violence.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:42 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

Har! I'm playing along and I get the "uhoh, the coral reefs are in trouble!" button and click it and get "aw, they all died, sad trombone!" And then the game just keeps chugging along. "What're you going to do about the steel mills and cold-water laundry and line-drying vs houseplants and these tiresome plebes all eating so darn much meat and dairy?" Nothing! We're as good as dead because we just killed the world's oceans and will therefore soon starve. Let's dump all this noblesse oblige hassle into the boiling sea and bring back the Concorde and masque of the red death it in the sky 'til we run out of jet fuel!
posted by Don Pepino at 8:07 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]