“It’s a very game-like problem: You’re trying to build things, and there are obstacles”

The decar­boniza­tion of New York City is extremely complex. Shifting away from oil and gas is diffi­cult enough on the scale of indi­vidual build­ings, as Skylight covers; for the city at large, it is a ques­tion involving major financing and large-scale infra­struc­tural upgrades, held up by bureau­cratic red tape, polit­ical forces, and, often, a lack of trust from the public. 

Yet for Richard Reiss, founder of City Atlas, a nonprofit climate literacy orga­ni­za­tion, all this boils down to a very simple problem: We want to make progress toward clean energy goals by building more things, and there are obsta­cles in the way of that progress. In 2018, Reiss and a team of student interns real­ized that the situ­a­tion of New York’s tran­si­tion to clean energy could be easily gami­fied, which led them to develop Energetic, a board game where players work together to model decar­bonizing New York City. 

The game works by convening a group of 4 – 6 people who must work together to chart a clean energy future by strate­gi­cally investing in infra­struc­ture over a period from 2021 – 2050. Players are assigned roles — activist, politi­cian, entre­pre­neur, engi­neer — that shape whether clean energy projects happen. They then draw cards that give them the ability to build clean energy sources and storage, working toward a collec­tive goal of deliv­ering enough clean energy to power all of New York City. 

Since its launch, Energetic has been adopted at high schools, univer­sites, public libraries, and by players at NYSERDA and ConEdison. Skylight caught up with Reiss over Zoom from his home in Woodstock, NY to chat more about the deci­sion-making that went into creating the game, and how he’s feeling now about the next chapter of its devel­op­ment and New York City’s clean energy future.

This inter­view has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Skylight: People across New York, across America, are choosing to support a tran­si­tion to clean energy in all types of ways. Skylight’s approach is ampli­fying the story of solu­tions to common building prob­lems. Why is your answer to the problem of the clean energy tran­si­tion a game?

The energy story is really the heart of it, right? There’s no easy way to find out how you would actu­ally do it — how you would actu­ally decar­bonize New York. Our initial thought was doing some­thing like making an info­graphic, then making it inter­ac­tive. And the game idea came up: We real­ized, wait, if we wrote rules, it could actu­ally be a real game.

It came together easily, because it’s a very game-like problem: You’re trying to build things, and there are obstacles.

The thing that turns out to work really well is that it gets past the polit­ical barriers in places where people resist the issue, because every­body likes a game. It’s a coop­er­a­tive game, too, so you’re playing as a team. And so, pretty much the moment people agree to play it, they’re already trying to solve the problem, because that’s the point of playing it. I think that’s a great educa­tional approach in general, because people really learn some­thing when they solve it for themselves.

I was wowed by just how many behind-the-scenes deci­sions had to be made in order to make this game playable. One of them that I was taken by in partic­ular was the goal to collab­o­ra­tively build the capacity for 16GW of carbon-neutral power — either by 2050, or by 2035, if they’re following the Green New Deal progres­sion of play. I’m curious how you decided on 16GW.

16GW is a ball­park. 2,000 watts is the [widely agreed upon daily] stan­dard, to try to get every­body in the world 2,000 watts. It’s a lot less than the US, per capita, but it’s decent for a New Yorker, because you have less energy use here — New York is an energy effi­cient place. It has a subway, more than half of New York doesn’t own a car, so, right off the bat, New York is going to be energy effi­cient. (2,000 watts x ~8 million New Yorkers = 16 GW of power.)

A couple years ago, after we did the game, Urban Green Council did their report on heat pumps, and [found that] when you elec­trify heat for the city, that’s going to be the biggest energy demand. Their model actu­ally comes in at 16GW; you really need to get to 16 just to provide heat and run the city.

If people are playing [Energetic] and they’re like, ​“Wait, 2,000 watts is barely anything, I want more power,” I’m like, ​“Okay, just keep playing. See how much you can add, because it’s up to you.” But the bottom line is it’s actu­ally hard to get to 16 [GW].

Something else I was struck by in the game is how much random chance factors into the game­play. Every turn, the players have to contend with ​“random events” that just pop up and shape the clean energy future. There are options like cloudy days, which are going to affect solar stability, but there are also options like mosquitos moving north and a migrant crisis, and I thought those were partic­u­larly fasci­nating. How did you choose to factor in things like public health,politics, and economic shifts to the gameplay?

We designed the game in 2018, but City Atlas had started in 2011, so we had seven years of reading scary infor­ma­tion. So it was a catharsis. We made [the scary infor­ma­tion] into a deck of cards.

Some of them have a direct effect, like, a hurri­cane knocks out a wind turbine or some­thing, but the public opinion scale is sort of a composite of public health and poli­tics. It’s not a perfect way to register a few sepa­rate things, but it works in the game pretty well as a driver — you’re losing public opinion, or strug­gling with public opinion, in order to build things that aren’t popular.

That’s a pretty clear-cut dynamic, right? If you and I got a billion dollars and said we were going build [a nuclear power plant], within 24 hours of us giving a press confer­ence, there would be people orga­nizing [against it], right?

The game has an elec­tion every four years. So you’re either in or out of power. [In real life,] what we had in our last elec­tion is an outsized impact.

Let’s talk about President Trump and what he’s doing now with roll­backs to clean energy initia­tives. There is a warning in the Energetic hand­book which says, ​“The energy tran­si­tion modeled in Energetic needs to happen with emer­gency speed if we are to maxi­mize our chances of avoiding a Hothouse Earth. And yet, if you are not noticing around you, it is not happening.” The game­play begins in 2021, and now here we are, nearing the end of 2025, and Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion is canceling millions in funding for offshore wind projects. It feels like we’re back­sliding, rather than making progress. So, how are you feeling about how we’re doing?

Reiss puts his face in his hands.

I’m sorry to upset you! Do you see his recent attacks on wind as a ​“random event” that will set back overall progress, or are you seeing it as a sign that this work is going to be stymied in a final way?

To prop­erly answer that ques­tion, I have to come to New York [City] and meet you in a bar.

I don’t think it’s final. It’s terrible, obvi­ously an enor­mous drag, that Trump came in. It’s different this time around. He was also in office when we devel­oped the game, right? 

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with wind, [but] New York and California and the states can continue to work. It wouldn’t be surprising if we continue to decar­bonize at some rate, even with Trump, simply because there’s more solar; I mean, California and other places that are already doing it will just continue.

I’m actu­ally working on a slightly modi­fied set of instruc­tions to play the game with [just] solar. Vassar College uses Energetic; [Philosophy] Professor Jeff Seidman, he’s used it for a couple of years. His class is built around also teaching what New York State’s poli­cies and goals are. So, what I think we’ll do is have them start the game in 2026 and only use solar, and if you can win the elec­tion in 2028, you can move back and start doing wind. 

How did you start learning and caring about decarbonization?

I credit [envi­ron­men­talist and author] Bill McKibben, because he was one of the first people to write [about it] for a popular audi­ence, and his book The End of Nature, which came out in 1989. My brother gave me a copy and told me to read it, prob­ably a couple years after that, and I took it at face value. 

In that period, in the 1990s, I think my default expec­ta­tion was that the finan­cial system would absorb this [problem] and some­body would make a lot of money off it, and that would produce solu­tions. But the thing is, it didn’t really happen. Then, in the 2000s, I began to think it would be combi­na­tion of posi­tive forces — that some of Wall Street would want to push back on the fossil fuel inter­ests, and that the univer­si­ties [would] inte­grate teaching [about decar­boniza­tion] — and then you’re going to have a whole gener­a­tion of people who get it, right? But that didn’t work.

So, you were like, ​“The world is going to take care of this,” and then it didn’t?

Yeah — ​“Powerful actors in the world are going to take care of this,” right? ​‘Cause most of the world doesn’t have that much influence. 

I was actu­ally directing tele­vi­sion commer­cials. In 2005, I started a non-profit, pro bono design program for people in creative fields to do their port­folio work in the public interest. We did a bunch of projects [about] climate change. One was an inter­view with Wally Broecker, who is a pioneer of climate science — he’s the guy who popu­lar­ized ​“global warming” as a phrase, in about 1975 — and [it convinced me that] this is really bad. It’s exis­ten­tial, and it’s exis­ten­tial for New York City.

We began to focus more on climate, and I got connected. I went to a confer­ence called Tipping Point, whose goal was bringing creative people together with scien­tists. After that, the CUNY people asked if I would be inter­ested in going in on a proposal for the Rockefeller Foundation to start a media project, to explain climate change in New York to people in New York.

Both at City Atlas and in other stages of your career, it seems that you’ve struc­tured your life around devel­oping public aware­ness of what we need to do to stop climate change, and you’ve often worked with students to make that happen. Why do you like working with young people on these things?

You’re not really going to move the needle in a media market like New York until you’re at the scale of an insti­tu­tion. But you can give hands-on expe­ri­ence to people who then move out into the world, and they know how to do what­ever it is you’ve done.

So you get a benefit in both ways, where you can get the content, and you also have the students learning, and you don’t need salaries, you don’t need to create a staff. They want to work on it. That’s a pretty good method for impro­vising, the way that we did it. 

What’s next for Energetic?

We want to make it for other cities. We are trying to actu­ally spin Energetic off to Indian cities — it’s used in some univer­si­ties as it is, but to make versions for India is the goal.

We also want to make an online plat­form. And we have a draft of the building version. That is actu­ally a little more compli­cated because it’s a different scale, but the hope would be that in a class, one half of the class could be playing the grid, and the other half could play the building [version], the block-sized, and they could play on the same time­line. So if a hurri­cane hits on the grid, it’s also hitting the block. That’s a class I would have liked to be in.

I think for students that’s a really good version, because they live in build­ings. Every student in New York, they’re in a building that has to change. The city is going to be contin­u­ously changing throughout [their] life, and these are all of the direc­tions that it need[s] to happen. So, both for the work­force oppor­tu­ni­ties and the prac­tical educa­tion around it, [we want to show them:] Here’s why we have to do all this. 

We’re teaching people because you need a popu­la­tion that you don’t have to start from scratch — that they get it.