The Climate Game

We'll have ice cream. We'll have beloved professor John Sterman, head of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and the System Dynamics Group. And we'll have a real-time climate model from our good friends at Climate Interactive, which lets you try out global climate policies—carbon tax! subsidies for wind and solar! stop deforestation! capture methane!—and see how far you can bend the curve of climate change.

We're the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, and we're excited to welcome you back to campus!

MIT students will role-play as delegations from different countries as they negotiate which paths the world will take in trying to limit global warming to no more than 2° C. The results will go into the En-ROADS climate change model—the same model used by the United Nations, the White House and the U.S. Congress to game out how different policies and technologies can help the world avert catastrophic climate change. How do these policies work separately, and together? How far can we go with the technology available today, and how much do we need to support new technologies in the future? Is it too late to prevent the worst? You'll find out as you race against time and overcome opposition to reach a global agreement on climate change.

Did we mention there will be ice cream?

This event is open to MIT students (both undergrad and graduate) and all members of the MIT community with campus access. Attendees should bring a charged laptop or tablet to run the En-ROADS model on their own computers, so they can test policy choices with their teams.