This (PDF) is the carbon cap and trade game that I created when it was my group's turn to present in Global Issues and Institutions class. It has two intended pedagogical purposes: to demonstrate how a carbon market will move production to more efficient producers (which is the the point of such a market), and to illustrate how cheating might undermine the benefits of such a market. I playtested it once, and then we played it once in class, and I discovered a third pedagogical purpose: to illustrate that smart, educated people may still have trouble creating a rational market in the context of a confusing, complicated new game :).

I created the game because a quick search didn't show anything quite like it. What I specifically wanted to create was a carbon emission permit market that could be created in a classroom without special equipment. This isn't a general-purpose "learn about global warming" game, it's an attempt to model a real, if very simple, permit market. It clearly needs more work, so I'm now offering the materials of the game on the internet, under a CC Attribution license (do whatever you want with it, but include my name and link back to this post).

Here's what didn't work when we tried it. (In some of these, "work" is subjective because we wanted to see a particular outcome for educational reasons; so there's a catch-22 between rigging the game to get the result you want, and setting up the game as an experimental simulation and seeing what happens. In general I think the model is so simple and contrived that it doesn't have any experimental information to offer; it should be treated purely as a teaching tool):

1. We didn't come anywhere near playing eight or twelve rounds in 30 minutes. We did two or three rounds in 1-2 hours.
2. The results over the few rounds we played weren't as expected. Overall efficiency should have improved, but it got worse. This probably reflects individual players not clearly understanding what actions to take. (Note that this also depends a huge assumption in the game, that companies that make more profit per unit of emission also make more economic output per unit of emission.)
3. Almost nobody cheated. Admirable but not realistic.
4. The paper bits for money and permits are a big pain in the ass. I think it would go better computerized, so that everybody's actions are forced to follow the rules of the game and so that we wouldn't need to do any data collection during the game. Of course, then you would need a computer lab or laptops to play.
5. I thought I rigged all of the companies so there would be some obvious buyers and obvious sellers, but that happened only shakily.
6. The instructions don't help make a working market. This is really the big problem underlying the others, because this is the crux of the home game. The game needs some clear notes on how to run a real auction market with buyers and sellers, so that everybody who wants to buy or sell can do so easily in a few minutes.

So, here it is. If you want help using it in your class, I'd be happy to help you.

The instructions PDF for the game can be downloaded here. The spreadsheet supporting the game is available here, in OpenOffice Calc format.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.