Good intentions at Glasgow must grapple with the Greta Dilemma (Kaushik Basu)
The world clearly faces its biggest challenge: climate change. With the recent CoP26 in Glasgow, we saw many politicians and diplomats pledge money and effort into promising a carbon-neutral economy. The article lays down some of the most important such efforts: European Green Deal (EU Carbon neutral by 2050), America’s 11.4 billion dollar per year commitment to reducing emissions and efforts by politicians on crafting the Green New Deal. However, skeptics rightly deem these targets and promises as hypocritical. Greta Thunberg, one of the most popular faces of protecting the earth from climate change, also calls these promises just something politican’s say but don’t act on. To analyze and understand how our actions can affect future generations Prof. Basu at Cornell came up with the Greta Dilemma.
The game can be described as the following: We have two players in this game: player A and player B. Player A makes a choice X that has the payoff (x1, x2) where x1 is player A’s payoff and x2 is player B’s payoff. Since player A will make the selfish and rational choice, they will choose their strategy to maximize x1 so we can say that x1 >= x for all x in X. Player B cannot influence the outcome in any way since player B is a bystander. In the environmental context, player B is the future generation, and player A is the current generation. Greta’s dilemma is “the paradoxical result whereby individuals who become environmentally conscious collectively do greater damage to the environment.” This is truly a shocking result, however, an important one. In this game therefore, according to the dilemma, if player A makes a choice to help player B, player A will end up causing more harm overall. Moral individual action does not necessarily translate to the collective good.
We now know that we can’t simply tackle this challenge through individual effort, but we also need to include moral and social sciences in crafting new policies. This has to be a collective effort, with a change in deep rooted habits of every individual. Game theory helps point out the interactions and outcomes of people in today’s connected and strategic world, and gives hope in case of climate change by telling us what strategy we can employ!
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/good-intentions-at-glasgow-must-grapple-with-the-greta-dilemma-11635871758546.html
http://kaushikbasu.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Vanderschraaf-5A.pdf