Climate Challenge, or How I Learned to Start Pandering and Love the Pork

I played the Climate Challenge game recently after discovering it on the Games for Change website and found it to be a provocative look at the politics and policy solutions related to global warming. While the gameplay has a few blind spots (mainly the lack of good feedback on economic performance) and gets a bit repetitive, Climate Challenge communicates and encourages reflection on some important and perennial political lessons.

The gist is that you "play as the President of Europe from 2000 to 2100 [!?], and attempt to reduce your carbon emissions while maintaining vital national services and remaining popular with the electorate." This is tougher than it seems. There are five variables you must monitor—finances, energy, food, water, and emissions—and five policy areas with which to affect these variables—national, trade, agriculture & industry, local, and household. You are evaluated at the end of your public service on indicators of environment, wealth, and popularity.

For my first attempt I figured why not go for broke with an aggressive Green platform: I ended up getting booted out of office after four rounds. My approval rating fell through the floor when I neglected the food supply and the water infrastructure in favor of fuel taxes and rapid expansion of renewable energy, and my administration was punished by climate-induced floods and heat waves that further compounded my popularity problems. Game Over. Chalk it up to the game's learning curve.

Periodically during Climate Challenge, Europe must engage in environmental diplomacy with the other blocs: North America, South America, Africa, South Asia, Pacifica, and North Asia. The negotiation stage is minimal and it's not clear what's at stake, but you have the option to subsidize green development in each region. Presumably these gestures rally the negotiators to your side. But what is your side? While emissions targets give you something to aim for, they also make your job harder.

On my second pass I tried to be a more sensitive leader while still negotiating in good faith for emissions reductions on the international stage. Fortunately the game is loaded with great policy choices with which to meet these goals—energy innovation and efficiency, transportation and green building regulations, and investments in basic research.

I found that one way to keep my rating high was to focus on subsidizing things people wanted, like home solar, and to steer clear of things they didn't, such as carbon taxes—promote, don't restrict—which seems to adhere to what Roger Pielke calls his "iron law" of climate politics.

Climate Challenge also offers some tempting public programs of uncertain value (within the game environment): launch a space program, host the Olympics, send foreign aid. These tend to hemorrhage money, energy, and emissions, but the voters like them.

I played a final round with an exaggerated pro-business approach, funding things like nuclear projects and carbon capture, yet even then I somehow managed to throw the economy into hyperinflation by 2100 and allow criminals to stalk the streets. Clearly the game needs better feedback on the socioeconomic front, as my approval rating ran high throughout.

While the gameplay is just a bunch of clicking, the real action happens on the conceptual level, and there are some nice contextual touches that teach the reality of nimbyism, resource limitations, and political trade-offs. For example, after each election you get a newspaper report on how your policies have been received. My favorite one said: "The most popular policy was 'Spin your policies.'" A few dollars spent on savvy PR can go a long way.

Political Conventions are a Waste

They say American presidential candidates must sell their product retail. But as the nominating conventions of both major American political parties recede into memory, all I can think is:

Someone just wasted a lot of money.

But then it’s not just the money that's wasted, is it? When I looked at the faces in the convention crowd, I didn't see Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, delegates and super-delegates. Instead, I saw tens of thousands of roundtrip airfares and as many or more rental cars. And for what?

Originally intended to facilitate the choice of a candidate by delegates from far-flung states, these conventions have evolved into something entirely other, but, nevertheless wholly American: A product launch.

The major political parties can no longer afford to indulge in the messy, unpredictable nominating conventions of the past. The election cycle has elongated while the news cycle has collapsed on itself. Like celebrities and big corporations, politicians have got to manage their brands. And that means driving news coverage. A successful convention does that.

While it might be good for business, it's a bad model for the 21st century.

Last year, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) in the U.K. came to the Carnegie Council for a discussion of Climate Change and the Green Economy. He made several points, but the one that stuck with me related to business travel.

I was just thinking on the way over here, sitting in a business class absolutely filled with business people – all exhausted, all away from their families, all going to business meetings. When is this going to stop? Of course the reason it can’t stop is if you are pitching for a contract and there are five of you competing, and four of you fly, and one of you tries to do it remotely, then you’re going to lose. When is business going to get to the stage where they say, “Actually, we only want to talk to people virtually.”

Both the Democrats and the Republicans tried to sell their conventions as "the greenest convention ever." But that is just preposterous. A green convention would be one where all the delegates stayed home, watched the speeches on YouTube, and cast their votes via secure online connections. Seems like it would be easy to do.

Unfortunately, if one party tries it and it flops, then like the business travellers in Taylor's example the other will feast on that failure.

I know somebody has to lose. But do they have to waste so much doing it?

Hammering NAFTA

In Mexico City yesterday, signatories of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were highly critical of statements made by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during their Tuesday debate indicating they would "opt-out" of the trade pact.

"I will say we will opt out of NAFTA unless we renegotiate," said Clinton.

Obama concurred: "We should use the hammer of a potential opt-out."

But as Michael Luo points out today in The New York Times, despite the harsh rhetoric, the candidates have staked out nuanced positions on NAFTA. Luo quotes David Gergen, an adivser to President Bill Clinton as saying that Senator Clinton was "extremely enthusiastic" about the trade agreement while it was being crafted. As recently as 2004, she claimed that NAFTA had been "good for New York and good for America."

Obama, for his part, while consistently hammering NAFTA, has not differed from Senator Clinton at all when voting in the Senate on trade issues. As Eduardo Porter notes in his article, "Nafta Is a Sweet Deal, So Why Are They So Sour?," the real benefits from a dismantling of the agreement would accrue to powerful industrial and agricultural special interests "who survive behind protective barriers." Specifically, American Big Sugar and Mexican corn farmers.

So why are Clinton and Obama itching to prove just how much more opposed to NAFTA they are then the other guy?

It's Ohio, stupid. The hotly contested state has lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the last five years.

In Ohio, which has lost nearly 225,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001, NAFTA is an easy target. For many working-class Ohioans – and the voters Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton hope to win in Tuesday's critical primary – it stands as a symbol for much that troubles their state. Against that backdrop, say experts, it's not surprising it's become a political piñata.

Candidates tiptoe around trade

An unusual story from Bloomberg's Hans Nichols and Julianna Goldman this morning. Unusual how? Well, for starters, it treats trade as a complex issue with wide-ranging, and by no means uniform, consequences.

Democratic presidential hopefuls are tip-toeing around an inconvenient economic fact: Iowa and New Hampshire, the states hosting the 2008 campaign's first contests, benefit from free-trade policies that many residents nonetheless blame for lost jobs. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are seeking to avoid alienating workers from agriculture and other export- intensive industries while appealing to those from U.S.-focused businesses that have fallen behind, especially union members.

In the past I have accused presidential candidates from both parties of engaging in "Campaign Protectionism." I have also offered an explanation for the unsettling phenomenon of declining support for free trade in the U.S.. Namely, the benefits are disguised while the costs are highly visible. Opportunistic politicians have often exploited this perception gap to great advantage. Hillary Clinton, especially, has wavered on support for free trade, giving the appearance of a naked play for labor union votes. Along with Obama and Edwards, she opposed the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement. Now, in this Bloomberg report, some nuances emerge.

"You have winners and losers from trade,'' New York Senator Clinton said at a Dec. 13 debate in Iowa. People "are gaining because we're exporting,'' she said, while others have lost jobs.

The location of this remark is significant. Support for Edwards is strong in Iowa and he is known as a union favorite. Could this be the beginnings of a navigation back towards the center in anticipation a general election campaign?

Sometimes, as in New Hampshire, trade's 'winners and losers' live side-by-side, making it difficult to tailor the message to the audience. Moreover, the unique juxtaposition of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries presents a difficult challenge to a candidate's desire for consistency. Nichols and Goldman cite poll numbers showing the two states are mirror images on free-trade: New Hamphire in favor, Iowa against.

WSJ: More bad news for free trade

Free trade sure could use a little good PR. This page one story in the Wall Street Journal underlines my fear that the election season will drive another nail into the free trade casket. Deborah Solomon and Greg Hitt document the growing ambivalence over trade in a state, Iowa, considered a "big winner from global trade."

...over the last couple of years, workers and voters in this blue-collar manufacturing outpost -- and throughout Iowa -- have grown decidedly downbeat about globalization. Trade has become such a hot subject that Democratic presidential candidates seeking support in Iowa's influential Jan. 3 caucuses are turning into trade skeptics, and the issue is splitting traditionally free-trade Republicans.

It's impossible to factor out how much of this trade skepticism can be attributed to Iowa's unique place in the US electoral calendar. But anti-trade sentiment is undeniably gaining steam nationwide despite reports that the falling dollar is stimulating exports. Peter Goodman, writing in the International Herald Tribune this week:

As the United States heads into what many economists predict will be a substantial economic slowdown, the success of U.S. companies in building sales in countries around the world may cushion the blow. It could help prevent the economy from slipping into a recession.

So which presidential candidate is prepared to make the argument that what the US needs is more trade, not less?