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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.'"
I think there is already quite enough gaming in the Climate Treaty discussion.
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.
We're fucked.
The Chinese argument is that their CO2 emission per capita is still less than of most developed countries.
The sooner we impose heavy tariffs on goods from countries that do not meet certain requirements for human rights and environmental policy, the better. We could do it now. It will hurt, but we could manage. If we wait a few decades, it will be too late.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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)
Largely irrelevant. If the Chinese won't play till their per capita CO2 emissions are comparable to EU/US levels, then CO2 emissions worldwide will continue to increase till then even if the EU and US reduce our emissions to ZERO.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Think about it... there can only be two kinds of people who behave according to "game theory":
-Economists
-Psychopaths
I'm planning on watching this BBC Documentary this weekend; it looks like the first segment discusses game theory.
It was a geography class and we were supposed to be countries working together. If everyone in the group chose A, everyone got 1 point, but if anyone chose B, they got several points while everyone else lost points. If everyone chose B, everyone lost points. In only took a couple of rounds before we lost all trust for each other and always picked B, so at least you only lost the same as everyone else. Kind of sad that international politics is often so similar.
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In frustration, I read the linked article, because I couldn't tell what the actual was about, from the Slashdot summary. Here's a better summary:
Researchers gave each person a national treasury of €20. In order to avert catastrophe, a minimum of €150 in the main pool had to be collected total. If catastrophe is not averted, each player's account is depleted by €15. Players got to keep any remaining money in their national treasury. In almost every game, people contributed enough money to avert catastrophe. It was only when the catastrophe was made more unpredictable that the game collapsed. Instead of requiring €150 to completely avert disaster, the catastrophe had a chance of happening based on how much money was allocated. In the second scenario, people promised enough money to minimize the risk, yet they did not allocate it, thinking that the odds would not be significantly increased if they underfunded the mitigation. Because so many people "embezzled", the odds were significantly affected and the catastrophe invariably occurred.
Basically, the players should have studied their Kant.
What describes the situation best is the Principal-Agent problem
Example from the Wiki: "Consider a dental patient (the principal) wondering whether his dentist (the agent) is recommending expensive treatment because it is truly necessary for the patient's dental health, or because it will generate income for the dentist."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
China is already playing the game and beating America at it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/07/27/china-leads-the-world-in-renewable-energy-investment/
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
The given scenario states, that we are all doomed, because there is no fixed point of disaster. However, they missed one thing. If if we had a fixed point. The point is outside of our lifespan. The effect of our doing will hit our children children. Therefore, the game has to be changed. You get the money and can spend it on green stuff. And when enough of the others do the same, the next group of people who plays the game gets the money.
They did and it worked as predicted. There is nothing wrong with game theory when applied accordingly. Game theorists pointed out that by present and past regulations short time gains can be increased by the risk of losses later. And they predicted that those who are able to stay ahead would not suffer losses. And that is exactly what happened. They played hot potato with a lot of hot potato. And someone burned their fingers. It is a pyramid-like game. They always fail in the end. But while normally the last players lose. In reality the states, meaning the people who did not play, have to pay for it.
You want more science used for evil, well they did ;-)
lol, there is no factor of 5 to 10. There is a factor of 5, and there is a factor of 10. Huge difference between the two, which is it?
In my experience the difference between psychopaths and the rest of us is not in how we behave, but in how we feel afterwards.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
You've phrased that incorrectly, because all people can "behave according" to game theory, but they may not be aware or else each be playing at a different game. In their example, they demonstrate incetive based reasoning with clear short term and long term benefits. They found that most people chose the short term benefit because they couldn't justify the value of their contribution to the more intangible long term benefit. So they took their chances on being able to weather what they considered a lesser loss.
If, in this game, they were told to play three times where after the first game the chips they had left were passed on to their children to use in the next, they could more realistically see the results of their decisions. If they did not contribute to the pot, then the threshold would never decrease, and they would be able to see that their children did not have a chance, no matter what they did. If their incentive switched from being able to keep a few coins to ensuring the survival of their children, the results might have been dramatically different.
Many people will do less than they possibly can because of the idea that someone else somehow pick up the slack, that their contribution in the grand scale of things doesn't matter, or that it's a waste of time and energy to tackle such small problems when they have so much else to do, which may be true in many cases. We have street sweepers, so why pick up the litter along the gutters? Why make a mock up of those projections myself, if I'm pretty sure Erica is already doing them? Why shouldn't we keep drilling for coal and oil and then converting it to CO2, we've been doing it for centuries and the planet is still here?
Conversely, there are also people who think primarily in the long term and make decisions which are designed to avoid expected future issues. However, it is a difficult position to justify, uphold, and perhaps monetize when others are already gaining profit from the things you've intentionally abstained from doing. Game theory is practical in this sense, because it demonstrates outcomes of decisions that rely on deeply human nature and gives us a chance to either meet it or rise above it; we use it to see realistically how we use our intellect.
Living like that, you will sooner or later.
Later may be your descendants though.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Agreed, we should restrict imports from the biggest polluters, especially America.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
lol, there is no factor of 5 to 10.
There is a factor of 5, and there is a factor of 10.
Huge difference between the two, which is it?
According to this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/18/china-average-europe-carbon-footprint
Per capita emissions for the EU/China are about the same at just over 7 tons per capita while that for the US is just over 17 tons. That's a factor of c.a. 2,3. I don't know how accurate these figures are but the proportions sound about right (in the sense that they match other reports that I have heard previously).
Wikipedia has:
China (ex.Macau, Hong Kong) at 7,031,916 thousand metric tons which is 23.53% of world total
United States at 5,461,014 thousand metric tons which is 18.27% of world total
The European Union (all 27 countries) at 4,177,817 thousand metric tons which is 13.98% of world total
India at 1,742,698 thousand metric tons which is 5.83% of world total
Keep in mind that China has a population of 1,35 Biliion, India 1,2 Billion, the EU has about 0.503 Billion inhabitants and there are 0.314 Billion of our US American cousins. I know these figures don't quite match the per capita ones I cited from the Guardian article (which are probably newer than the ones on Wikipedia anyway) but it's the proportions that are interesting. 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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Only the Daily Mail's article you so desperately want to be a true was, in fact, a lie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong
"Hard to know whom to believe" is a fair comment, but the answer is very rarely "The Daily Mail".
It is a trashy tabloid that styles pretends it is a serious broadsheet. Pretty much a joke to most people in the UK.
http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/
Canada will never have a low per capita rate of energy usage. Firstly, it's cold here. Heating energy use is related to population density and average temperature. Canada has a low population density, and with exceptions like Toronto and Vancouver, will likely always have that population distributed over a large area. This means we will always have a high energy use per person, simply because of heat and transportation costs.
Secondly, Canada has a great deal of economic activity per person (farming, heavy industry, mining.) Europe does not grow enough food to feed itself. Canada one farmer may have several thousand acres of land to farm. It takes a significant amount of energy (fertilizer) and fuel to run a 1000 acre farm. With 2% of Canada's population in farming, Canada will have a rotten per capita energy score. The same logic applies to any kind of heavy industry. Heavy industry is energy intensive. Many industries exist in Canada because we have cheap energy. 30% of Canada's population is tied to manufacturing, and that 30% will use a huge amount of energy per capita.
Unless the entire population of India moves to Canada, Canada is never going to score well on any per capita energy consumption index. To a lesser extent, the same applies to the US. It's heavy industry and farming sectors are on the same scale as China's, however the US population is a fraction of China's. Even if the US consumer stopped using SUVs, the US would still use a great deal of energy per person. The most popular vehicles in Canada are one full vehicle size smaller than the most popular vehicles in the US, and our gas prices are almost as high as Europes. Canada's per capita energy consumption and CO2 numbers are remain high.
Per capita metrics only make sense when comparing between countries with similar industrial outputs and economies. Europe will have declining CO2 output levels, because they have light industry and a declining population. China, US, Canada will have huge and increasing energy and CO2 numbers, because we have growing economies and huge heavy industry. Per capita, China will look a lot better than the US and Canada, because of the population difference.
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.
The CO2 per capita is a completely specious argument. The only question is your net CO2 consumption, but all the figures thrown about are the gross production. According to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Bottomless-Well-Twilight-Virtue-Energy/dp/046503117X , North America is the only continent which consumes more CO2 than it produces. It can do this largely because it is sparsely populated, and has a large amount of forests and vegetation compared to its population. It should be self evident that a given land mass can only support so many people given a particular level of technology. My suspicion is that Europe and China are over that limit, and the USA is under. As others have mentioned, much of the world outsources their agriculture to us, and we outsource much of our manufacturing to others, so we can't just say everyone gets so much CO2 per square foot of land. But we also can't just say every person gets so much CO2. It is a complicated global problem, and the best we can do globally, is to make sure that the cost to maintain our CO2 at healthy levels is incorporated into the price of the goods and services produced. The problem is that, while the task can be stated simply, it is quite complicated to implement.
If you actually did pay for yours, then no one would complain. The problem is when you dump all of your externalities on everyone else and expect them to pay for yours too.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you actually did pay for yours, then no one would complain. The problem is when you dump all of your externalities on everyone else and expect them to pay for yours too.
What you just recommended is for him to minimize his externalities while letting everyone else dump theirs on him. While you are at it, why not ask him to bend over and let people repeatedly stick it in him?
You are proving his point. Imagine a 20-player version of prisoners dilemma with an asymmetric payoff table that allows coalitions. There will undoubtedly be at least one player whos dominant strategy (always derives greater benefit) is to make the move that incidentally hurts other players the most. The only way to convince these player(s) to cooperate is to pay them off an amount equal to or greater than what they have to sacrifice in order to cooperate.
Outside of game theory, this phenomena is called tragedy of the commons.
In general for all 3 or more player games, unless the game is carefully crafted to disallow it, the best move is to seek to form a coalition that puts you in a group that has a dominant strategy position and then work to undermine competing groups that also have dominant strategy positions. The only way this doesnt go tragedy-of-the-commons is when everyone benefits whenever the strongest group benefits.
"His name was James Damore."
One thing I've always wondered about with respect to China, India, and similar countries is: How are they calculating the CO2 emissions? The methods used would seem to me to underestimate the CO2 from people burning lumber they chopped themselves or agricultural leftovers because they're dirt farmers and they're still using the same techniques that worked for their great great grandparents back in the 1800s.
Does the CO2 calculation only take new CO2 emissions into account, IE burning fossil fuels? That would make some sense, but would miss out on the big picture IMHO, as it represents at least a temporary increase in global CO2.
I read the internet for the articles.
They're working towards a different desired outcome. The climate treaty negotiators are politicians, their goal has nothing to do with climate change. It's a combination of ego, kickbacks and self promotion. The sooner they finish arguing and come up with a solution, the sooner they stop getting paid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries
would disagree with your "99% percent of oil is refined in the US" claim
It's the third largest exporter in the world (behind only China and Germany).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's irrelevant to the control of global warming, but it *is* relevant to the fairness of the regulations. There are, however, other factors. Enough other factors, that I'm dubious that people could come to an agreement on what was fair even in the absence of strong economic incentives to argue.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.