BBC Climate Challenge

The BBC is hosting a cool online climate challenge game. It is sort of like the Sim_ series of games, but you make policy decisions on every level to try to reduce your carbon dioxide emissions while maintaining enough money, food, water, and your popularity as president of Europe.

On each turn (a decade), you play 6 cards from your stack of options of National, Trade, Industry, Local, and Household policies. Each card shows the cost/income and the effects on the other parameters, along with the popularity of the choice. Supposedly you can get kicked out of office if you make enough unpopular decisions. Also, 3 times during the game, you meet with the presidents of the other continents of the world and try to get them to agree to reduce their CO2 emissions, often requiring you to subsidize them.

The goal is the reduce your CO2 emissions to zero over 100 years while maintaining food, water, and money for Europe, and keeping the people happy enough. I have no idea how realistic the effects of the choices are, but they seem pretty good to a political ignoramus like me.

I think this game is a good exercise for some of the high and mighty out there who believe that going green is a matter of simple choices, and also for those who simply want to try to understand the cause and effect, or unintended consequences, of going green. For example, small scale organic farming is obviously more green than medium or large scale factory farming, but then your people will go hungry and you may have to import food, which produces a lot of CO2 and other pollution in the transportation.

On my first try, I got good grades for meeting my CO2 reduction goals, but I left Europe in ruins as nobody had any money or food to eat.