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Climate Treaty Negotiators Are Taking the Wrong Approach, Say Game Theorists
An anonymous reader writes "Climate treaty negotiators would do well to have a little chat with some game theorists, according to this article. The fundamental approach they've been taking for the last several years is flawed, these researchers say, and they can prove it. From the article: 'The scientists gave members of a 10-member group their country’s “treasure”: a 20-euro national savings account, plus a fund for spending on emissions reductions that consisted of 10 black chips worth 10 cents apiece and 10 red chips worth one euro apiece. Each person could then contribute any number of these chips to a common pool. The contributed chips represented greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were relatively inexpensive (black) or expensive (red). Players could communicate freely about their plans for how many chips they intended to contribute.'"
The negotiations must fail, because they're all based on blame and negativity. Fingerpointing between the first world and the developing world is not at all useful. Every premise we've seen so far has been based on the lose-lose more strategy of negotiating.
Uhm, China has been quite willing over the past two decades. Especially in the period 1990 - 2005 China was open for serious reductions. It was the stubborn asshole-ness of Australia, USA and Canada that eventually made China turn around. If you want to play the blame game I suggest you start with Team USA.
(posting as anonymous as I don't want my account linked to this comment, I work on this for the Canadian government)
Some 300 million US Americans manage to generate the carbon footprint of a Billion Chinese, while 500 million Europeans can hardly hold a candle to the US in terms of carbon emissions.
Well the reality is that 200 million Chinese manage to generate the carbon footprint of 300 million US Americans while the other 1.1 billion Chinese generate very little. Both the US and China need to get their shit together, while India should be commended for being able to ramp up their economy without generating so many greenhouse gases. For bargaining purposes, a more fair arrangement is to agree to a limit of X tons/person + Y tons/GDP.