SimCity Flashbacks

Posted by Shirley Siluk Gregory Nov 8, 2007

Anyone who's ever played the video game SimCity knows how difficult it is to keep a virtual community humming along smoothly over time. Sooner or later, some small, neglected problem -- whether it was low tax revenues or insufficient police protection -- would metastasize into a runaway crisis. And, by the time that happened, trying to apply a fix was all but impossible.

Raising taxes to generate more money for the police, for example, would cause residents to revolt and businesses to move out of town, once again depleting the city's coffers. Sooner or later, all the pieces of the city -- infrastructure, business, homes, parks -- would crumble beyond repair and the game was over.

And that, I'm afraid, is the situation we're risking by not taking immediate and meaningful action now to curb greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. This problem, no longer small but definitely neglected, threatens to reach a point where all the money, programs and technology we throw at it will be just an ineffective a fix as the desperate SimCity tax hike. We'll have let the problem fester and grow for too long to manage it comfortably.

Now here's the scary part: we're not sure when we will reach that pivotal moment, that point of no return. There are plenty who believe we've already passed that critical time, while others pooh-pooh the fact that climate change is even a threat to worry about. I'm not ready to take the fatalist viewpoint yet, but I will do everything I can to reduce my impact on the planet and lobby my elected officials to take the larger actions I personally can't. I hope many, many others will adopt the same approach ... for all our sakes.