Fate of the World: A Climate Change Quest

The river was aflame, red fire licking at what was once called water. Fire roared up like the wrath of a nature left scorned and soiled, the tiniest seed of the great upheaval to come from the toll that humanity has extracted from mother Earth. The city nearby is a place of sirens and uniforms, emergency services pulling up en masse with barely enough gear to keep the dark chemical fires from licking away at the buildings on the shoreline.

From afar it's almost beautiful, the river's course carrying the slowly moving fires atop chemical sludge as the futile efforts of humanity fail to deal with it. There are faint flashes of uniforms, of ladders, the silvery trails of water launched from high pressure hoses – nothing works.

Instead, people watch. Windows are home to eyes and in some cases cameras, artists in the area write songs and stories, the newspapers write of industrial accidents and call for calm. The songs and the stories say one thing, the news another, and the government tacking a course towards calm and the status quo.
For that one incident, it held.

The fragile status quo of industry and the state acting in concert against a growing popular movement was broken when the silence came. The birds failed to sing for more than one summer, the red darting forms of sparrows and the varicolored forms of songbirds absent from the long summers of the decade.

Instead, they found eggshells. In the shells were the crumpled tiny forms dead from exposure and broken shelters, eggshells thinned by a diet of pesticide and insecticide leaving a wealth of stillborn songs.

This time the books and the songs and the scientists scored a bitterly contested victory. The books and the songs and the scientists managed to eke out an environmental agency, although it was a hampered one. Climate change was not on the table, mitigation was. Regulation was not on the table, cleanup was. While the new Environmental Protection Agency was to have an independent governing body and a mandate enshrined in Congressional legislation, the Presidency controlled the cabinet and its oversight authority - and more importantly the EPA's purse strings. Successive directors were appointed with the qualifications required by the foundational acts of the agency and a lack of political tact, desperately attempting to chart a course away from what many in the scientific community viewed as near certain catastrophe.

They were not entirely successful.

When did you fall into the hot seat of the EPA, to manage to secure a degree of control over America's runaway emissions habit?

Name?
[]Write In
Gender identity?
[]Write In

Pick one:
[] 2000: A new millennium, a new President, a promised economic boom. The United States is a global behemoth, self-confident and cocksure in its status. The U.S. scientific establishment is one of the finest in the world, trusted by many, and both of the incoming Presidents seem to hew to its recommendations – at least on paper. In practice, though, they say different things.

-[] The Gore Presidency: The new Democratic administration of Al Gore will have a hard road to walk, considering the narrow victory that was won purely from a refusal to concede in Florida. While the Presidency will thus have to work with bipartisan legislation, they're more than willing to let the EPA off the leash… This is easy mode. A cooperative initial Presidency, decent initial funding and time to fix the worst of it.

-[] The Bush Presidency: President George W. Bush was elected in 2000, and followed through on his mandate almost immediately. Wider drilling rights, more oil being tapped, more subsidies for the majors, and a Vice President Cheney who had deep links to the oil industry. The EPA? Let them deal with school education and cleaning up the Superfund sites, that'll do for them. This is the hard-ish scenario. An uncooperative Presidency, a myriad of commitments, and inadequate funding.

[]2025: January 2025, after the 2024 election, a time of awareness of what was coming. The world in general was poised for impact after more than two decades of failing to address climate change, although with the United States still home to a substantial chunk of climate deniers things are not as easy as they seem. The beefed-up EPA will have problems in future…Moderate: Very hard climate mitigation and emission control tasks but popular and Presidential support initially.

Pick an origin:
[]The Scientist: With enough expertise, you can call bullshit on some of the pork projects and make sure the others are productive – while also coming in on time and under budget. A pity you have more scruples than to work for LockMart, you'd make more money there. +10 to all technical project dice.

[]The Politician: You came in through local politics, earned the required degree for the EPA through some fly-by-night college, and managed to corral enough grassroots support for climate legislation that you wound up dumped in the EPA. If you had federal connections, you could accomplish more than you can now, but you were pre-empted by the President. +10 to all political actions.

[]The Ex-Senator: A doctorate was a carefully covered up fact in your political career, often not alluded to and quietly ignored. When running the EPA you'd long since forgotten what you learned – but the connections you made in the Senate more than made up for that. After all, with enough federal money and Congressional support you can do damn near anything and buy the expertise you needed. +10 federal influence per turn.

Pick a secondary origin:
[]Scientific Hobby: You read about and learned about the climate after you'd read that book about the sparrows, after that eerie silence outside the house made you wake up trying to listen for what wasn't there anymore. You're not a true 'scientist', but your circle of connections and your knowledge base are in some places comparable. +5 to all technical project dice.

[]Lobbying: You didn't work for LockMart, but you did work for Schlumberger for a while on the Hill. They're more reasonable than Exxon, but not by much – they do, however, make for a useful set of connections. And the other connections you made on the Hill aren't that bad either. +5 to all political dice.

[]Politics: You've been a federal bureaucrat for quite some time now, and that's resulted in a deep well of connections across the civil service and among the staffers on the Hill. You're not someone who can lobby Congress easily, but you are someone who is very hard to fire. +5 federal influence per turn.

AN: Political dice are policy, technical dice are mitigation, adaptation, R&D and so on, federal influence is spent on unpopular policy, spent to exist as a department, spent to not be fired and so on. Similar to Five Year Plan Quest. Votes may begin. Please vote by plan.
This is being written as a relatively optimistic quest after two weeks' depression and whatnot. I can't deal with much and I'm probably not doing much narrative for now, hence the 5YP scheme.

You are Jake Harper, and you're tired. Tired and hungover with too much hair of the dog last night. It was a hell of a thing the last few days to stop Al from conceding, to keep the fight going, but goddamn if it hadn't paid off yesterday. Past the Bush Governor holding the count, past the Brooks Brothers suits throwing up a fuss, past everything that Karl Rove managed to scare up at the last minute.
Gore was in. President.

And you? You're part of the Administration now. Ex-Senator, holding a worthless doctorate from a degree mill that churns them out by the thousand. The halls of the Reagan federal building are gray and austere, the ghost of old Ronnie Raygun's budget cuts haunting these halls. You get a few nods from some of the staff who came in this early in the morning, eight A.M. the day after the longest election finally ended. You nod back, and they don't start a conversation.

Fair's fair. You're the new boss, they want to know if you're like the old boss or not. Clinton ignored the EPA for most of his tenure, but Gore...Gore has said different.

"Sir." You get another nod, a vague wave of the security guard's hand towards his cap as if in salute when you reach the Director's office. The door opens to the key you managed to get your hands on, creaking and grumbling like the tired old man the entire Reagan Federal Building seems to be. Your office is a plain one, with most of your predecessor's things taken out already and most of the briefing papers, documents, and information stored away.

There's a portrait of Slick Willy the outgoing President above the Director's chair, one that you give a tip of the head to. He'll be out by the evening, when the federal movers bring your things inside. On the table – the bare, polished wooden desk that's probably an antique – is nothing except a folded piece of paper addressed to The New Director.

You open it. It doesn't say much. A bit about the EPA. A bit about how important you'll be. How much more you'll be handling than the organization originally thought. The usual bumf about how Nixon's original EPA was a landmark.
It ends with Good luck. You'll need it.

You smile sourly, hands almost automatically tucking the note into your suit jacket's pockets. You're from Georgia, you already know you'll need it.

Pick up to two additional areas of responsibility. You may choose to take 'None' and play the historical EPA:

[]None: The historical option. Incompatible with any other choice.

[]National Laboratory Administration: Some of the DoE National Labs – the ones that were slated to be privatized towards the end of the Cold War – were partially handed over to an EPA that had been expanded and begun to recover in the Bush Presidency. The Republicans see this as a way to keep the defense research establishment intact, but most within the EPA seek to turn swords to plowshares. With luck, the other departments who have a stake will be understanding. More initial research dice, free due to a federal research funding pool. You will have federal research mandates as well. You will begin with partial/joint control of Idaho National Lab, Los Alamos' Nuclear Cleanup Center, Sandia National Labs' Environmental Research Center.

[]National Education Administration: The EPA was handed the mandate of educating the nation's youth on the topic of the environment and spreading awareness of the importance of conservation. Handed off as a sop to the eco-activists and intended to be no more than teaching about Theodore Roosevelt, it allowed the Department of Education to demand funds from the EPA. It does, however, leave you with an effective and quite large public-relations and outreach arm. Begin with additional free dice for public relations and a separate PR mandate.

[]National Green Energy Policy: This was a sop to the ag activists and the ones that thought biofuels were either the future of energy or the amazing new market for corn. While the focus is still on biofuels, there's enough subsidy funding left over for regional offices to start handing out grants to firms working on solar panels, geothermal power, tidal power and other such things. In addition to this, involving the private sector allows the environmental lobby to grow more teeth on Capitol Hill – we might not like the way things are but we may as well use them. Begin with additional free dice for corporate actions and a separate corporate/subsidy mandate.

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Along with the bonuses though, along with the increased beefiness of the EPA, there came an increased responsibility. A large amount of that was simply following through on environmental cleanup duties inherited from earlier administrations, but other things were also promised by a Democratic administration that had a budget surplus to play with. Things like regulation enforcement rather than Reaganite 'cooperative inspection', a green energy and emissions mandate, an implicit subsidy for American built cars through the use of emissions technology regulations and EPA vehicle inspections, and more.

Pick at least two: If []None was taken above you need not pick any. Note that they come with slight boosts in resourcing if taken:

[]Superfunding: There are Superfund sites all across America, implicit acknowledgements that the EPA was unable to fund the rapid cleanup of those areas. They're disproportionately in the Rust Belt and in flyover country, and Gore has already promised funding to get them cleaned and for the cleanup jobs to go to locals. Pork, to be sure – but you're not one to gainsay more funding. You will have a moderate amount more funding but must clean up three major Superfund sites or make significant progress on them by the end of Turn 4.

[]`Green' Energy Mandate: This is a promise made internationally as well as at home, that the President would fund the use of American biofuels and American solar instead of shipping in Saudi gas. American oil majors are grumbling at the precedent, but they're also split – with some of them dipping a toe into the biofuel processing space they're not a unified lobbying force. Of course, corn-based biofuels aren't exactly the most green of things, but at least the nation is making steps in the right direction. You will have to reach a certain percentage of renewable energy by Turn 4 or make significant progress towards that. Despite not being emissions neutral, corn biofuel is counted towards that total. You will have more funding and more energy related options.

[]What Comes In: Something recently proposed by some carmakers is the use of EPA inspections to verify emissions regulation compliance. The Presidency plans to use this to ensure environmental compliance with as much of U.S. consumption as possible, beginning with cars – and if that just so happens to give the Detroit boys a breathing space, well and good. You will have to act as an inspection and emissions oversight organ for imports, making you unpopular abroad and having to lose more political influence every turn at home as certain multinationals lobby against it. You will have more funding and more support from nativists.

[]Privatization: Most of the EPA's intellectual property can be used by private industry. Whether they can make effective use of it is another matter, but Congress has been on a privatization kick lately – you can have some more money if you set up IP transfer pipelines and work more with contractors rather than federal employees. Pensions cost money, after all. You will have to transfer R&D to industry and have to fund industrial research to a certain extent using R&D dice, you will have contractor options for department actions that will have to be taken to keep federal influence dipping too low. You will have a little more funding and more lobbyist support.

AN: PLease vote by plan. Votes are open.