I often check climate news against Daybreak’s simple model to see how things are progressing in the real world. It’s imperfect to be sure, but it does help bring a sense of scale and a framework for understanding all the disparate pieces of news.
Daybreak has two opposing dynamics that gave the game its core tension. First, it shows how the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere leads to an increase in global temperatures and how this increase leads to tipping points that further accelerate heating in a vicious cycle.
But we also showed how various technologies and policies can feed into each other to create virtuous cycles. For example, as the price of solar and batteries goes down it becomes more attractive solution. This drives more adoption, which in turn, makes it easier to roll out more solar and batteries which further reduces costs, and so on.
These two cycles: vicious and virtuous are playing out right now before our eyes. They’re evident in two dramatic graphs that I came across recently. Each of them illustrates one of these dynamics.
I encountered the first in Bill McKibben’s substack, The Crucial Years:
The slope in this graph showing global temperature is continuing to rise… and I don’t like that it’s headed well past 2.0°F. It’s not bending in the other direction; it’s getting worse at an increasing rate. If we started our game of Daybreak in 2020 and each round took about five years, the above graph has us losing the game at the end of round four.
But while you hold that in your mind, also check out the following:
This graph, based on data from the IEA and BloombergNEF, is all the more stunning, largely due to all the investments made by China. It shows the number of solar installations each year and how they’ve consistently beat expectations. In Daybreak terms, you could achieve this effect by rolling out a Major Solar Program with a lot of supporting solar tags.
Meanwhile, the US player has decided not to play anymore and has stepped away from the table.
“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” — The New York Times
There’s so much going on right now in our news cycle. But I’d like to encourage you to see how so much of it is connected. The fossil fuel industry is working very, very hard to ensure that the US player stops playing the game.
If you’re in the US, every little bit you can do to help defend our democracy will help get us back to the table and playing our turn. It’s very hard to win a 4-player game of Daybreak when one of the players is sitting out.