Essay by Eric Worrall

Reaching into homes and messing with people’s minds, Guardian style.

Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?

A new wave of game makers are attempting to influence a generation of environmentally conscious players. Will it work, and is it enough?

Lewis Gordon Thu 26 Jan 2023 20.30 AEDT

It was scary. It made you realise how, despite all the sophistication of modern society, we’re still reliant on water falling from the sky.” Sam Alfred, the lead designer at Cape Town-based video game studio Free Lives, vividly remembers his city nearly running out of water. During 2018, the area surrounding South Africa’s second largest city suffered months of dwindling rainfall. Dams were unable to replenish themselves at the rate its inhabitants required. Water was rationed. Businesses shut. The situation even called for its own grim version of the Doomsday Clock: hour by hour, the city ticked ever closer to Day Zero, marking the end of its fresh water supply.

Terra Nil, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrifying events. Dubbed a “city-builder in reverse”, it foregoes the consumption and expansion of genre classics such as Civilisation and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Starting with arid desert, it’s up to the player to rewild a landscape using various technologies – a toxin scrubber, for example, or a beehive. At light-speed, and with eye-massaging flushes of emerald green and azure blue, the environment transforms into lush vegetation. Terra Nil’s simplicity is as beautiful as its visuals, offering the satisfaction of a colouring book while doling out a clear-eyed critique of environment-wrecking extraction.

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Regardless of whether it changes minds or behaviour, there’s an appetite from game makers and players alike to engage with the ongoing threat of global heating. Games such as ABZÛ and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure – ecological fables set in the ocean and on land – are among many that show us a way of seeing the world that isn’t through an aiming reticle.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jan/26/can-video-games-change-peoples-minds-about-the-climate-crisis

Back in the real world, even “The Conversation” admitted Cape Town’s 2017-18 water crisis was in large part caused by corruption and incompetence, not climate change, same as most of South Africa’s other problems.

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The cause of the crisis

The civil society group, South African Water Caucus, reveals that national government’s reluctance to release drought relief funding stemmed from spiralling debt, mismanagement and corruption in the national Department of Water and Sanitation.

This claim is supported by the Auditor General, which attributes “irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure” to the department exceeding its 2016-2017 budget by R110.8 million.

The department has no funding allocated to drought relief in the Western Cape next year. Again, provincial government will have to foot the bill.

Had systems in national government been running smoothly, Cape Town’s water crisis could have been mitigated. Appropriate water allocations would have made more water available to Cape Town. And with timely responses to disaster declarations, water augmentation infrastructure could have been up and running already.

Cape Town teaches us that water crises are rarely a matter of rainfall. Understanding disasters like droughts involves seeing the issue from many different perspectives, including politics.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-88191

As for the Guardian’s advocacy of using computer games to increase climate concern, it is difficult to imagine something more reprehensible.

A lot of computer game players are young people. Young people are already so frightened of climate change, they are destroying themselves with hard drugs, because they cannot face their fear.

The following is testimony from Dr. Alex Wodak, a high profile Australian expert on drug rehabilitation, to an ice addition inquiry in NSW in

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First, the threshold step is redefining drugs as primarily a health and social issue rather than primarily a law enforcement issue. Second, drug treatment has to be expanded and improved until it reaches the same level as other health services. Third, all penalties for personal drug use and possession have to be scrapped.

Fourth, as much of the drug market as possible has to be regulated while recognising that part of the drug market is already regulated, such a methadone treatment, needle and syringe programs, medically supervised injecting centres. It will, of course, never be possible to regulate the entire drug market. We have regulated parts of the drug market before. Edible opium was taxed and regulated in Australia until 1906 and in the United States Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903.

Fifth, efforts to reduce the demand for powerful psychoactive drugs in Australia have had limited benefit and require a new focus. Unless and until young Australians feel optimistic about their future, demand for drugs will remain strong. Young people, understandably, want more certainty about their future prospects, including climate, education, jobs and housing affordability. Change will be slow and incremental, like all social policy reform.

As Herb Stein, as adviser to President Nixon said:
Things that cannot go on forever don’t.

Drug prohibition cannot go on forever and will be replaced by libertarian paternalism. Thank you.

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Source: Wayback Machine

I’m not an advocate of censoring computer games, but in my opinion there is nothing praiseworthy about actions designed to increase climate concern. I believe climate change focussed games could tip even more people, especially vulnerable young people, into a crisis from which they might not recover. Climate concern amongst young people especially is already cranked up so hard that some of the kids are breaking.

Sunday Open Thread

From MasterResource

By Julián Salazar Velásquez 

Ed. note: Julián Salazar Velásquez, geologist and petroleum engineer in the Mexican and Venezuelan oil industries, is a leading educator and proponent of free market energy. He is author of numerous articles and Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos” (2020), a primer on the oil industry value chain. His four-part world view began with Part I and Part II and concludes tomorrow with Part IV.

If institutions and governments consider hydrocarbons and coal as a curse, what will follow is a great retrogression, not unlike historical precedents of collapsed civilizations. Incredibly, this has already occurred in several countries.

Most have witnessed the benefits from fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and gas. Yes, atmospheric CO₂ emissions have increased, but so have the living standards of a record number of people, what is called The Great Breakthrough. Examine the data for yourself: economic, demographic, educational, health, quality of life, political, science and technology, productivity and food consumption, and others that are too many to list.

In the economic aspect, the impact in recent years can be observed according to the indicators of: Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP), world exports, and poverty rate. Dwell upon the growth in world population and life expectancy.

From the perspective of education, health, quality of life, politics, science and technology, and food production, note the improvement in basic education, literacy, vaccination, infant mortality, and democracy.

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As shown in Figure 5 below, it is since the Industrial Revolution—which had as a triggering factor the use of coal as fuel to power steam engines, steamboats, railways, spinning machines and other innovative technologies— that CO₂ emissions began to be generated into the atmosphere. Simultaneously, the world’s prosperity stage began, and then accelerated at the beginning of the 20th century with the use of energy sources derived from oil and gas, making the 20th century the century of exponential development. Such development continues to this day.

The most used macroeconomic indicator to measure the wealth of countries and their inhabitants, the Gross Domestic Product per Capita (GDP per capita), begins its sustained growth from the use of coal as an energy source that sustains the Industrial Revolution (Figure 6). This indicator skyrockets from the beginning of the 20th century with the incorporation of petroleum-derived fuels such as gasoline, fuel oil, kerosene and gas and oil that give movement to the global productive apparatus.

That prosperity is reflected in the global export growth indicator that follows an exponential trend like most 20th and 21st century indices (Figure 7).

The most important indicator of global prosperity is declining poverty. As shown in Figure 8, the indicator of extreme poverty (that is, those inhabitants who live with an income of less than 1.90 international dollars per day) has trended downward as fossil fuels came to dominate the energy market. In 1820, 88.2% of the world population lived in extreme poverty; in 2015, less than 10%, which correlates with the substitution of fossil fuels for dilute, intermittent renewable energies (primitive biomass, falling water, etc.).

Figure 9 shows the distribution of extreme poverty by region. Poverty is below 10% in the most economically developed countries, such as USA , Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Western Offshoots), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and East Asia. However, extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is at 56% of the population, characterized by its very low energy consumption.

The rate for Latin America is 5%, which does not include the terrible condition of Venezuela. This country has regressed to pre-industrial levels with a poverty rate in excess of Africa’s 56% according to a study by the Andres Bello Catholic University (UCAB) in 2021. Little surprise, Venezuela is marked by an almost total lack of freedom with the implementation of unfeasible communist projects and policies.

The behavior of the demographic indicators corresponds to those previously analyzed, in the sense that the variation of the world population and life expectancy are also influenced by the start of the Industrial Revolution and the use of fossil fuels. According to the graphs in Figure 10, the world population begins a substantial increase from the Industrial Revolution, which was 1.26 billion in 1850 until it grows and reaches 7.5 in 2020, estimating 8.91 for 2050.

Similarly, life expectancy was around 35 years in the continents of America, Europe and Oceania, which has grown steadily from that time until reaching 80 years in 2019; while the rest of the world ranged from under 30 years old to slightly over 60 years old in the same period. This important improvement has been due to the decrease in infant and adult mortality, due to the progress of medical technology and public health and, to the improvement of the aforementioned indicators such as: the rate of poverty and GDP per capita, plus others related to basic education, literacy, vaccination, and infant mortality.

In the composite Figure 11, human progress is evident in terms of quality of life, which improves transcendentally from the widespread use of coal as an enabler of the Industrial Revolution and the addition of fuels derived from oil from the 20th century, which is manifested by 17% with basic education in 1820 rising to 86% in 2015; as well as an literacy improvement from 12% to 85% in 2014.

On the other hand, only 1% of the population in 1820 lived in countries governed in democratic freedom, while in 2015 it reached 56%. By 1820 the benefits of vaccination campaigns against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus were unknown; in 2015, a 86% vaccination rate was achieved. This was a high-impact factor in the decline in infant mortality from 43% in 1820 to just 4% in 2015.