Texas: The Energy-Only Bias

So far, no electricity market is able to completely avoid blackouts due to insufficient capacity. That means some mechanism must decide the extent of blackouts that will be accepted. There are two ways to control the quantity of capacity the market will build — by regulating prices or by regulating the quantity of capacity purchased […]

Frozen: Electric Blackouts inTexas

Massive blackouts in TX raise two questions: Was in wind — does climate policy threaten America? And was it free-wheeling TX regulation?

Toward a New Climate Game (2)

A Reciprocal Voluntary Agreement Back to Post #1 Feb 1, 2021 — In the prior post, I concluded that the UN climate game, since the signing of the Kyoto accord, has been a voluntary public-goods game and that such games are known to cause a downward spiral of ambition (altruism). An alternative (the Preface Game) […]

Toward a New Climate Game (1)

First in a series on new climate-cooperation experiments — Why We Need to Change the Climate Game

Thorium Reactors? Or, Molten Salt?

I’ve been curious about thorium for years. Now, Andrew Yang proposes to spend $50 billion researching thorium molten salt reactors by 2025.

Honor & the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Game theory assumes sociopathic players. That leads to cooperation failures in repeated games. Except it doesn’t. Not unless the players also know for sure that the other players are too.

Freeman Dyson on Climate

Here’s a fun interview with Freeman Dyson, the guy that explained Richard Feynman to the world (and improved his math). He also recently discovered some very interesting new properties of repeated prisoner-dilemma games. You can be absolutely sure his views are not tainted by oil companies, but he thinks we really do not understand climate. That […]

Why Is OPEC Letting The Oil Price Crash?

In January 2015 History is the key In 1980, the Saudi’s oil minister, Yamani, warned OPEC it was trying to keep the price too high. They didn’t listen, and all agreed to cut production. The Saudis did, but the rest cheated. To hold their cartel together, the Saudis cut supply even more than promised, but […]

Hofstadter’s Super Rationality

Climate negotiations are a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, so we need to find a way to change the game or change the outcome of a prisoner’s dilemma. Douglas Hofstadter (of Scientific American math-column fame) proposes that if we can induce players to be “super-rational” we may get a more cooperative outcome. Does this make sense? […]

Honor and Punishment

Chimps and people subscribe to similar codes of honor. It’s been built in for 7 million years, and it may be just what we need to enforce a cooperative climate treaty.