21RST CENTURY: “The Game against Nature”

Jan-Erik Lane

doi:10.11114/bms.v1i1.697

Abstract

When a decision-maker faces a choice between alternatives of action in a situation of uncertainty, one speaks of a “game against Nature” when he/she faces no interaction with another player or group. In the process of global warming, mankind is the one player facing two alternatives: resilience or precaution. Not knowing fully the consequences of the increase in the emission of greenhouse gases on climate change or the implications of climate change for biological and social system, what action to take? If there were a global benevolent rule, he/she may decide to avoid the worst outcome. But global ecological policy-making requires the coordination among a large number of players, which open up the possibility of reneging as well as carries heavy transaction costs.

Highlights

Global ecological policy-making requires the coordination among a large number of players, which open up the possibility of reneging as well as carries heavy transaction costs
When the somewhat 190 governments of the world come together under the UN climate change program or when the G20 group of nations, representing around 70 per cent of global population, meet to discuss ecological policy-making, this sets up a so-called “Game against Nature”
2) In global ecological policy-making, the actor is a collective group of states, either the 190 UN group or the G20 group

Summary

Introduction

When the somewhat 190 governments of the world come together under the UN climate change program or when the G20 group of nations, representing around 70 per cent of global population, meet to discuss ecological policy-making, this sets up a so-called “Game against Nature” (individual decision-making under risk). Individual decision-makers like human beings solve the game against Nature by either avoiding the worst outcome (minmax) or calculate the expected value over the alternatives and their probable outcomes (maxmin). When many governments come together to decide upon the goals and means of global policy, the requirement of unanimity is conducive to huge transaction costs; b) The various governments differ greatly in their estimates of probabilities and outcome costs involved in the alternatives of action; c) Countries already hit by the consequences of global warming favour precaution, whereas other countries prefer to wait and see – resilience; d) When preventive measures harm the prospects of economic growth, countries differ in how they trade off the two entities against each other; e) Collective action strategies – preference distortion, delay, reneging – come in as a major disturbance of the possibility of collective rationality. A major source of conflict is the confusion of greenhouse gases per capita and total emissions, which has a bearing upon the distribution of costs with any common policy

Total and Per Capita Emissions

Overall Decline in Ecological Capital

Juggernaut

Findings

Conclusion