Game Theory and Climate Change
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-change-prediction-game-theory-tragedy-of-commons
The article discusses an academic paper, which came to a conclusion that climate change will continue to get worse before it gets better. It all comes down to our every day, individual choices. Should we use the plastic bags so conveniently provided by the grocery store instead of carrying our own reusable bags? Should we continue to allow the use of chemicals that degrade the ozone layer, which protects us from the Sun? It’s less so that we aren’t aware of the detrimental effects of our actions, but more so that we are aware, but that the incentives as individuals misalign with group interests, resulting in social dilemmas. We use game theory tools to analyze these dilemmas.
In the course, we talked about games and game theory. Fighting climate change is essentially a game in which we are the players (playing with or against each other), and we choose between two strategies: to work together and cooperate in fighting climate change for the collective goodness or carry on with our selfish convenience.
The payoffs are more complicated. In pursuing our shortsighted motives, we gain immediately, so we pay less attention to what we lose less immediately: the deterioration of the environment and global warming. These all seem to happen some time in the “future,” so we feel that following our current desires yields a better payoff, as the incentive to “save the environment” isn’t as strong. Recently, however, more intense and direct environmental problems have caught our attention: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc. This urges us to reevaluate our payoffs and reconsider our strategies. The quicker and more direct the effects, the more incentive we have to collaborate to fight climate change. The article explains that this is why we quickly banned chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons when we discovered a drop in atmosphere ozone.
Governments and institutions can incentivize individuals and groups to do more to combat climate change. We can’t wait for the effects of global warming to get us to act, lawmakers can devise incentives to give us more immediate and direct outcomes. That way, we are more likely to collaborate and work in collective interest.