Fate of the World: A Climate Change Agency 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. 
