Strategic analysis of Global warming

From Marconomica Principle #5 I've grouped entities strategically as countries. In the global scale, it is countries leaders making the commitments on behalf of all their citizens. The Dillemma's leaders of democracies face is that signed committments get votes now, but may lose them votes if they fail to achieve them later, or if it ends up costing more than voters are willing to pay. The over-riding strategic concern must be "the tragedy of the commons". I have imagined scenarios in which generalised fears cause emmissions to accelerate, with every country more or less blaming every other country. Individual countries obviously try to make any committments at such a long term as to ensure they won't lose personally by failing. As the long term committment nears maturity, the gap between the committment and reality will be so wide that no Government would accept responsibility. The proposed targets are framed in such a way that it is only the end result that is being argued over - not anything in between that will necessarily have to happen to get there (eg goals within an electoral term window). Examples that perhaps ought to be copied if we were serious about it, have their own horrors associated. For instance, Russia is the only Kyoto ratifier to obviously achieve their goal. Clearly, having an economy tank is an obvious way to reduce emissions, but no environmentalist is seriously suggesting it (except Peter Garrett before he became a politician:)). Also examples of rich countries with a very low carbon intensity exist (France), but this contradicts heavily with environmentalists hatred of Hydro and Nuclear power (and hatred of France). Having all but strategically ruled out strategies with proven records, my prediction is of a 10% increase in emmissions in developed countries by 2020 (from 2000 figures)

Game Theory 101

I was casually browsing the web googling game theory, and the third lecture listed on a university schedule explained the "tragedy of the commons" game/situation. It escapes me why this stuff isn't taught in primary school alongside other special interest science stuff they learn, such as the environment etc, but I digress. A critical lesson is that if a situation can be proved as such, the solutions, though obviously difficult should be obvious. The trick is always about reorganising such that the common resource is no longer common.
The less talked about opposite twin of the situation is the "tragedy of the anti-commons" This is rarer, but any argument against Kyoto would have to play up the possibility of this occuring.

The problem with fear

It often comes up in arguments about global warming, Y2k bugs and nuclear armageddon. People feel vindicated in sending and propagating alarmist arguments, whether or not the aftermath ends up completely benign or not. For the Y2k bug for instance, people who wildly exaggerated the dangers felt that it turned out well at least in part because fear focused peoples minds to fixing the problems. I will argue right here and now that widespread fear is neither sufficient nor necessary to "fix" global warming (I'm using the word fix loosely, to indicate the avoidance of civilisation threatening disaster). The example I am going to use is Easter Island and the emptying of the Aral sea. These are the kind of situations we are trying to avoid with the Earth in a sense. There was very likely widespread fear in both of these cases. The math/science was not very hard to work out and well within the grasp of the citizens involved. The problem on Easter Island was in one sense statutory - given the location of the island, human nature, and the technologies and cultures they had at the time, the island was doomed from when the first settlement took place. The problem is easily described in game theory as the "tragedy of the commons", and the various "fixes" are completely "structural" in nature. They generally involve some kind of "ownership" of the common resource (ownership leads to good stewardship by correctly valuing it), and a central arbitration of competing interests on the resource. In other words if applied to global warming, the Kyoto protocol, carbon trading, and the continuing measurement and tracking of all the variables is vital and probably sufficient if it doesn't completely break down in acrimony. The continuing risk is both cheaters, and a lack of central authority which may enforce aspects in the future. Fear, as it stands may not even be helpful, as it breeds mistrust of any future central arbitrer.

Banana Republic

Dr. Clam said...
Rereading your post reminds me- have you read Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Chose to Succeed or Fail" yet? Apparently both the Easter Islanders and the Norse colonists on Greenland began their precipitous slides toward disaster when they allowed banana imports from overseas. Amazing but true!

3:12 PM

Hence the term "Banana Republic" resonates true :). I kind of want to read the book, but I fear it is absolutely great on accurate history and makes grand points about the environment, but fails to abstract a technical theory from it. I feel that to apply what we learn from distinct (separate) cases from history, we have to abstract mathematical models (or at least game theory models) that explain what is happening. It is of absolutely no consequence if the author allows the reader to come to whatever conclusion they like such as - "That means we've got to stop killing whales, right?" or some general environmental platitude like: Lets dramatically subsidise renewable energy.

Without even reading the various examples in the book, I still think they correlate closely to the "tragedy of the commons". Game theory can be used to simulate those examples - then similarities can be compared to the modern world to see if certain fish stocks are going to become extinct, whether pollution is destined to keep increasing, whether drought in Africa is going to cause mass famine etc. EnviroGeometeorologists can predict future temperature rises all they like, but have they even thought of applying game theory to see how the reactions and/or competitive pressure and fears of disaster change the likely future. In a few short years, the world seems to have gone from a free for all for using resources as economy dictates, to a fractured world where fear in some has completely changed the resource economies, while the relatively resource poor have continued to demand them.