Allow me to ruin your Friday productivity by pointing you towards a climate quiz game created by the Financial Times. Your task is to get to net zero by 2050, and the game presents you with a series of choices. Select the policies that will cut emissions, set targets, invest in technologies, and see what the global temperature is by 2050.
It’s a massive simplification, naturally, but a valid one for educational purposes. You don’t get the degrowth option, and it’s heavy on the hydrogen and technological solutions, but it’s still based in the science. “The FT wanted to bring to life a process that can often seem abstract and dizzyingly complex” say the designers. “It requires changes in every sector of the economy, as well as in the way we live.” Putting it into a game structure presents quite a lot of information, and a sense of the trade-offs involved, in an engaging way.
This is all the more important when ‘net zero’ is widely misunderstood, and subject to misinformation campaigns from certain political factions. At worst it’s described as a plot, or environmentalist hysteria, or economic suicide. More often it’s just undermined by tabloid rhetoric about the government coming for your gas boiler or your McDonalds burger. So it’s helpful to get people to engage, even superficially, with the sorts of decisions involved in reaching net zero by 2050.
Challenges like this have been compiled before. The government has its net zero challenge, and before that came the McKay calculator, or this rather older one from the BBC. You can achieve similiar things in a more rhttps://ig.ft.com/climate-game/elational fashion with the card game Carbon City Zero.
The Earthbound Report 