Really???

[Docsis]

Man Made Global Warming.. the greatest scam ever pulled....now it's a game. Sheesh. Thanks, but no thanks, Al Gore. I love my huge carbon footprint.

[Simon Love]

Originally posted by Docsis:

Man Made Global Warming.. the greatest scam ever pulled....now it's a game. Sheesh. Thanks, but no thanks, Al Gore. I love my huge carbon footprint.

Human-made climate change is supported by all credible evidence. Denying the evidence doesn't prove anything. You are simply supporting fossil fuel corporation propaganda.

[Docsis]

ok... whatever you say.
Please destroy your car/truck, and get a battery powered car.. oh wait. it takes fossil fuel to charge it so that wont do.... I guess you need to get a bike.
Please remove your HVAC in your home.

Al Gore will fly his jet to your town to thank you personally. Please give him a hug for me when you see him.

[Delnar_Ersike]

Hmm, you're probably better off making these comments in a more popular section of the internet (a subreddit, maybe?). FotW's community forums barely see any traffic, mainly because the game itself has been forgotten by a lot of people who have given it a shot.

If you dislike the way people advocate for and talk about climate change, there are a lot better arguments you could use than "climate change isn't real". Let's face it, we've all grown tired of that approach, you aren't going to convince anyone by going down that route.
Instead, try bringing up something else that your opponents will expect less, and so you will have a better time making them doubt themselves. For example, a lot of climate change advocates say that people need to build a ton of solar plants for completely emissions-free electricity; possible problems include the fact that solar cells require a boatload of toxic chemicals to be produced and so can actually end up doing a lot more harm to the environment than help it, or that you need a massive amount of expensive batteries (that also need toxic chemicals) to even begin to be able to mitigate possible brownouts from a solar-only infrastructure. Another popular idea among these advocates is that there needs to be a tax on emissions, with people having to pay money depending on how much greenhouse gases they emit. A possible problem with this plan is the fact that because a carbon tax is a flat tax, it would create inequality the same way the sales tax (or VAT) does: a person making $7.50 an hour would need to pay the same amount of money for their daily commute as a person making $30.00 an hour. Worse yet, because more carbon- and energy-efficient devices often cost more up-front, you'll have situations where richer folks can afford to get stuff that reduces the amount of money they'd need to pay, while poorer folks are left using less efficient devices and actually having to pay more in carbon taxes than everyone else (see: the 'boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness[www.goodreads.com]).
Pointing out these types of issues will get a lot more "climate change people" listening to you and rethinking their ideas than if you just shout hyperbolic insults at them.

[tcurran]

I don't believe it one bit but that doesn't make it a boring game

Also, for a fun fact you emit more "fossil fuel gas"using a hybrid into the air than you would using a SuV. There's your argument or some of it anyway.

[Delnar_Ersike]

tomcurran: This is actually why the game has you switch transportation to all-electric, because things are very murky when it comes to hybrids. The overall emissions of a hybrid depend on both the average commute paths and the energy mix of the region. If your commute has very little stop-and-go traffic and you basically don't stop a lot (e.g. you spend the majority of your commute on a freeway or highway), you might as well be driving a petrol/gasoline-powered car (diesel's also a bit complicated), since the electric motor of a hybrid only kicks in when you accelerate or decelerate. Remember, electric motors have ridiculous torque compared to internal combustion engines, so they're only turned on when you need their torque (it's also why Tesla cars have "turbo" buttons that accelerate the car ridiculously fast, torque is where electric motors shine the best). In any case, even if you use your electric motor so much that your hybrid is almost interchangeable with an all-electric vehicle, your overall emissions depend on how you get your electricity, and this is modeled fairly well with the game's Switch Transport to Electric card: if your region uses coal or oil, you emit a lot more with an electric motor than with an internal combustion one (using oil for internal combustion is more efficient than burning it in a power plant to turn into electricity for an electric motor), but otherwise you emit less, though things are again bit weird if your region uses solar for its energy mix (solar generation is emissions-free, but solar panels have a big environmental impact when manufactured due to the reliance on rare earth metals and complicated manufacturing techniques). Oh yeah, and let's not forget about the environmental impact of battery manufacturing: the batteries that go into hybrids and all-electrics rely on lithium mining as well as a bunch of rare earths, so a hybrid or all-electric car's equipment itself has a bigger manufacturing environmental impact than that of a conventional car (so you basically start at a deficit emissions-wise and need to slowly work yourself into a net positive). None of this is accounted for in the game because the dynamic is extremely complicated, plus the game doesn't recognize any resources other than fossil fuels (probably to simplify things).

Going a bit meta, these are the types of considerations that should go into a climate change game. If you present as much of the truth as possible while admitting any and all faults in your game, there is nothing left for people to latch onto saying, "Oh, they lied here, I cannot trust this game because I don't know where else they lied," because they know where else you lied, because you admitted every single one beforehand. If you can't be 100% trustworthy, at least be 100% accountable: if you admit every lie, people can trust that anything you did not admit as a lie probably is not (if they don't, then it's probably due to a more personal problem, i.e. people believe something because they want to believe it, not because they're looking for solutions).

[LiK\\Apo]

-See retarded post like OP's
-Check nationality
-Feel justified in all your prejudices against US americans

[Delnar_Ersike]

Originally posted by LiK\\Apo:

-See retarded post like OP's
-Check nationality
-Feel justified in all your prejudices against US americans

Now, now, let's not make any rash decisions. After all, I, too, am American (you'll note that my Unofficial Patch uses American English, while the original developers primarily used British English because they're from the UK). Let's not have any German smugness from you (based on my time in Germany masquerading as a non-American, I found that a lot of Germans feel especially smug over Americans), especially since that's the sort of behavior that gets idiots talking about cross-shaped, Indian religious symbols.

[His Royal Freakness]

After so much time your mod is HANDSDOWN THE BEST thing to have happened to the game, still play it to this day, still have a love-hate relationship with it.

As to your previous point Delnar on the statement about refining our arguments against the basic premise of the game's message, I would say it goes back to my initial ideological frustration (Consumerism V. Environmentalism). Although the science on Climate Change is much debated, years after having first played this game I still stand by my observation that the major concerns and discourse are not on the science, but on the conclusions Environmentalist/Leftist comes to. If Climate Change were in fact to be of the kind of concern the game portrays, then the public discourse shouldn't be simply about renewability, but on the subject of what will we ultimately do if in fact runaway climate change occurs i.e. adaptation as well. Although now after so many years I realize that the creators of the game present a premise that is disengenous, and have a warped perception of reality, the kind that no doubt turns people off. In the end I found that in my personal case, the game polarized me, and completely fell on it's face trying to "convert" me, if you will. Brain-washing people into thinking that living a lower standard of living is a moral imperative as we see with the notions of the "buisiness as usual" mantra, "less is more", a "New-Green Deal", etc. It's not far off from some frustrated guy shouting about big Al, his carbon credit racket, and his massive jet spewing carbon into the air. "Muh Prius", as you pointed out (the batteries, the cost, etc, do these people even think?) are not a response to climate change and rising sea-levels either, neither is "de-growth". People are tired of the elitism, people are too busy trying to be happy, and not be angry, contemptful, misanthropic greenies, and I just can't blame them, the toxicity (pardon the ironic pun) on the other side of the intellectual discussion is just too much.

PS. how would you add an effect on a card or event when on the script? That would be awesome to know.

[His Royal Freakness]

Note: Not all greenies are toxic, I tempered myself and realized the lies, I can have fancy stuff and still love the Earth and clean air. Many of the "Eco-friendly" people I've met are just do-gooders, they tend to have decent taste in coffee. ;P

[Delnar_Ersike]

Catarcio: all of the game's cards and events are located in .lua files in /share/fotw/policies. You can change an existing card/effect by creating a new .lua file, finding the old card or effect's entry in an existing .lua file, copy over that entry to your new .lua file, and make changes in that new entry. Lua files are loaded in alphabetical order, so if you want your card/event to properly override all existing ones, make sure you name your new .lua file so that it will come last in the load order. Adding new cards/events is a bit more involved, though you do generally start by copying over the entry of an existing card/event to your new file just so that it acts as a template, then change the template so that it has effects you want to achieve. You'll then want to assign the card/event an ID that is not used for any other card or event; if you're adding an event, you'll also want to add that event to a new or existing dealer (adding/changing dealers works the same way as adding cards/events, though dealers have a separate set of IDs). Note that for more complicated effects, you'll have to set up a chain of invisible events to fire, which is quite tedious, and even then there's a lot you simple cannot do in-game (e.g. multiplication by a continuous function). For example, my Orbital Factory change required me to add a new version of every single space card affected and change every single associated space event to work off of the new cards as well as the old ones.

As for your anger at green culture, some of it is deserved while other parts are hindering. For example, even though there are a lot of potential problems associated with battery production, those problems may have a lower net environmental cost than sticking with fossil fuel consumption (i.e. the total environmental damage as a result of their use is less significant than that of fossil fuel use, and/or the damage may be more easily reversible). Net economic cost is also extremely hard to calculate (seeing as environmental damage cascades into economic cost, but environemntal damage mitigation or aversion can also cascade into economic cost), not to mention how people tend to find short-term economic cost much less desirable than long-term economic cost, even if total cost for the latter is much greater than for the former.

I guess most of it comes down to an unfortunate set of circumstances surrounding climate change. First unfortunate circumstance: that climate change was only really noticed in the 1970's and mitigation only really started off in the 1990's, whereas it's been happening since the 19th century. This puts a clock on total mitigation, and as you could hopefully tell by playing this game, that clock is too short for a lot of amicable solutions to work (by amicable, I mean stuff that is easily compatible with economic noninterventionism). As a side effect, the imminent nature of the problem radicalizes people who want to solve it, and as a result people who want to ignore it as well. Second unfortunate circumstance: in the anglosphere, climate change has been shunned by political parties that rule the more traditionalist half of the political spectrum. This means that what should be a universal issue that transcends party lines has been forced into becoming part of the progressive political identity. Identity, political or otherwise, influences thought, thought dictates solutions to the problem, so the pool of known solutions also becomes more homogenous and one-sided (this homogeniety is maybe what you dislike so much), making shunning the problem even more desirable for those who do not agree with the pool of known problems (and shunning a problem is easier than addressing it), and so the hole gets dug deeper and deeper. Third, fourth, and fifth unfortunate circumstance: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, where negligence, poor PR, and mismanagement have swayed public opinion against one of the most potentially useful tools for climate change mitigation. Sixth unfortunate circumstance: coal, oil, and natural gas deposits are more widely distributed across the globe, while uranium, lithium, and rare earth deposits tend to be concentrated into a few, key areas (Australia + Canada + Kazakhstan, Patagonia, and central China respectively), so switching from one to another is not necessarily favorable for more protectionist minds living outside of hotspots for the latter three. Seventh unfortunate circumstance: we currently have few political parties who represent economic pragmatism in the anglosphere and the majority of the 1st and 2nd world, and those who do tend to have a negligible voice. This reduces the chance that potential solutions will be tweaked to work optimally, and for suitable solutions that are undesirable to the public to be tweaked to be more agreeable. While politics have always been ugly, there has usually been a major actor or two that has worked towards tempering others' idealism to make it work instead of outright rejecting it. Now though, there is nobody left to fill those shoes in most countries' political systems, so it should be no wonder that many of the known, potential (partial) tools for addressing climate change remain untempered.

[tcurran]

Originally posted by LiK\\Apo:

-See retarded post like OP's
-Check nationality
-Feel justified in all your prejudices against US americans

The United Kingdom, France, Canada, Russia, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Japan, or wherever you are from has done things equal to what you dislike the U.S. for.