From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Just what we need, right? A board game designed to make kids feel even more miserable and guilty about climate change.

Finnish School Children Solve This Climate Puzzle Every Year. Can You?

The Climate Puzzle, a board game developed by Danish climate company D-mat, uses emissions data to show players how to live more sustainably.

Every year, hundreds of teenagers in Lahti, Finland, play a game.

Instructors pull out a large board with a series of squares, each labeled with a climate-friendly action. “I will reduce the energy of doing laundry,” reads one. “I will buy items secondhand or recycled (90% of purchased items),” goes another. “I will favour organic food.” “I will try a vegan diet (12 months/person/year).” “I will favour sustainable services.” The size of each square corresponds with the impact of the action it outlines; the square about eating organic, for example, is less than a tenth the size of the one about going vegan.

This is the Climate Puzzle, a board game developed by Finnish sustainability company D-mat Ltd.and purchased for Lahti’s schools to help students learn to live more sustainably. The game uses emissions data from “1.5-Degree Lifestyles,” a study that D-mat Chief Executive Officer Michael Lettenmeier helped write, which calculates how much carbon each person can emit to keep global warming below the 1.5C threshold outlined in the Paris Agreement. Numerically, the report suggests an individual carbon budget of 2.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person per year by 2030. Practically, that means many people would need to dramatically change how they travel, eat and vacation in an ever-warming world.

“This puzzle means that we have a whole box of different options to decrease carbon footprints,” Lettenmeier says. His ideal outcome is for players to pick the right squares for the board and then try to implement those behaviors in their real lives.

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“It’s quite a guilt-inducing area,” Akenji says. “We have to be careful to understand where individual agency comes in, collective responsibility comes in, and where policies and businesses need to take responsibility for this.” 

…Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-18/what-can-you-do-to-stop-climate-change-a-board-game-has-answers?leadSource=uverify%20wall

To say I don’t think this idea is helpful is an understatement. Kids are already so upset by climate change it is driving some of them to destroy themselves with hard drugs.

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.

…Source: Wayback Machine

What can I say? I guess climate activists don’t see anything wrong with making kids feel miserable and guilty, providing it produces the outcome they want. They’ll keep producing this kind of material, as long as there are adults who are crazy enough to buy such things.