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Climate Games: Experiments on How People Prevent Disaster
Talbot M. Andrews, Andrew W. Delton, and Reuben Kline
Can humanity work together to mitigate the effects of climate change? Climate Games argues we can. This book brings together a decade and a half of experimentation, conducted by researchers around the world, which shows that people can and will work together to prevent disasters like climate change. These experiments, called economic games, put money on the line to create laboratory disasters. Participants must work together by spending a bit of money now to prevent themselves from losing even more money in the future. Will people sacrifice their own money to prevent disaster? Can people make wise decisions? And can people decide wisely on behalf of others? The answer is a resounding yes.
Yet real climate change is a complex social dilemma involving the world's nearly eight billion inhabitants. In the real world, the worst effects of climate change are likely to be felt by developing countries, while most of the decisions will be made by rich, industrialized countries. And while the world as a whole would be better off if all nations reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, any given nation could decide it would be even better off if it continued emitting and let other nations take care of the problem. These disaster experiments test how real people respond to climate change's unique constellation of challenges and deliver a positive message: People will prevent disaster.
Fig. 4. The decision each player faced. A player starts with a personal pot of money. If they make a “certain contribution,” that money is given directly to the group’s threshold. If they make a “risky contribution,” there is a 50% chance the money will be doubled before going to the group’s threshold and a 50% chance the money will disappear and nothing will go to the group’s threshold. If they “defect,” then they keep their personal money, and nothing goes to the group threshold.
Fig. 12. The decision each player faced. A player starts with a personal pot of money. If they make a “certain contribution,” that money is given directly to the group’s threshold. If they make a “risky contribution,” there is a 50% chance the money will be doubled before going to the group’s threshold and a 50% chance the money will disappear and nothing will go to the group’s threshold. If they “defect,” then they keep their personal money, and nothing goes to the group threshold.
Fig. 16. The basics of the backfire game. Four citizens each independently decide how much to give to a threshold to prevent disaster. A policymaker decides whether to enact geoengineering. If the policymaker uses geoengineering, it could succeed and meet the group’s threshold. But if geoengineering fails, it also backfires. When it backfires, citizens lose money and continue to face the same challenge of preventing disaster.
Fig. 21. The two phases of the self-created disaster game. The top panel shows the harvest phase, where each of the six players decides how much money to take from the commons. The bottom panel shows the disaster phase, where the same players have to decide how much of the harvested funds to contribute to prevent disaster. The cost of disaster prevention and the risk of disaster are determined by how much players harvested.