Climate CoLab "Global Plan" contest enters judging phase

The MIT Climate CoLab "Global Plan" contest's first phase, proposal preparation, is over and the second phase, where the judges select the semi-finalists, has begun.

Here are the published aims of the contest:

"This contest seeks an overall plan for the world as a whole. A key aspect of the contest is that authors are invited to create integrated proposals, which can incorporate proposals from both prior and currently active Climate CoLab contests. Proposals in this contest will be evaluated in large part on how well they bring together proposals from other contests to articulate a broad, coherent vision of what the world as a whole should do. Authors can also access the EnROADS simulator developed by Climate Interactive or model runs from Stanford’s Energy Modeling Forum that project the future environmental and economic outcomes of proposed actions."

Here's my own submission, Green Keynesianism and Climate Free Trade Areas

It's been an interesting experience entering the contest. Disappointing too, at times, especially in the last few days, when "throwaway" proposals proliferated. About twenty-five additional proposals, almost all of them very weak intellectually, were posted to the site just in the last couple of weeks.

Most of the new proposals, and a large portion of the old, require what I call "magical thinking", in that they will never be adopted because they are politically or economically unworkable, or both. Some even contravened the Laws of Thermodynamics.

As critical thinking exercises go, most third-year Unity students can do better than this.

But there were some interesting submissions, a handful.

I don't envy the judges their task, sorting the wheat from the chaff.