Energetic in New York

Students at Hunter College High School practice decarbonizing NYC. (Ph: R. Pinkerton)

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We work on energy literacy as a path to decarbonization. 

To prevent climate change from getting worse, we have to build new infrastructure quickly and for that to happen, people have to agree to it. We need ten years of almost perfect cooperation between governments, businesses, and the public.

Our solution is to create a public practice space for the transition. With this method, players of all ages can learn how to fix climate change with accurate, updatable info, scaling from a 2.5 hr game to a month long series of workshops, matched to where they live.

Our collaborative game, ENERGETIC, is now used in classes in 18 public high schools in NYC, as well as in classes at universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Bard, Vassar, Vanderbilt, University College Dublin, and IIT Bombay, and for events at Harvard, Yale, Brown, CUNY Grad Center, and Cornell Tech. ENERGETIC has been used by corporations and NGOs including Con Ed, Urban Green Council, Scotiabank, McKinsey, BCG, and NY Renews, and has been featured in The New York Times and on NY 1. ENERGETIC will be shown at AGU24, the principal conference for climate researchers.

Evidence shows that the public has to be on board and know what needs to be done to build the political will for a rapid transition. Students being able to explain the energy transition to their families will be crucial to getting it done on time.

Our focus on clear, accurate education is confirmed by the findings in last year’s National Academies report on solving climate change in the US, which spells out the urgent need for an informed public.

ENERGETIC is a four-player cooperative challenge in which you work to decarbonize New York City by building 16 GW of carbon neutral energy by 2035 (in the Green New Deal version) or 2050 (in the standard version). You can build entirely with renewables (wind, water and solar), or, by doing research before construction, include advanced nuclear power or natural gas with carbon capture (CCS).

By using a game, we have found a way to engage players in the challenge themselves, while giving them a sense of the interlocking dynamics that are part of the solutions. In one 2.5 hour game play, the shape of the problem and the paths to solutions become clear.

Thanks to teachers who have administered a Google Forms survey for our project, we have results from six NYC high schools, and 255 students. The key before and after question in the survey is “How confident would you be in describing the factors in the energy transition to a family member?” In each class surveyed, students became more confident in their understanding of the energy transition, and more confident in being able to describe the steps to decarbonize NYC. In classes at Bronx Science, there was a five-fold increase in students answering ‘confident’ (4) and ‘very confident’ (5) after learning with ENERGETIC when measured against their responses on a pre-game survey on energy.

Survey question: “How confident would you be in describing the factors in the energy transition to a family member?” Movement to the right indicates an increase in confidence. Full survey results.

There are 67,000 12th graders in NYC and we want to give them all practice solving climate change themselves, as soon as possible, because it’s central to their future lives. And beyond them, we plan to scale to the additional 100,000+ 12th graders in the rest of New York state.

Students in Kevin Jacobs’ class at Beacon High School in NYC.

A case study is the class above at Beacon High School, where the students now have accurate information and strategic ideas on how NYC can meet the goals of the CLCPA.

Our supporters and advisors include academics, high school students and their teachers, and IPCC authors. Photos of the game in use in a wide range of classes and events with players of all ages are here

Daniel Aldana Cohen at UC Berkeley, co-founder of the Climate and Community Project, explains the value of our game-based approach to climate and energy education in his brief interview below:

High school teachers have given us letters of support for Congressional funding, and they describe in depth the classroom benefits. And with resources and partnerships, we can produce larger public events with people of all ages, scale up workshops with hundreds of facilitators drawn from the climate movement in New York, and create a wave of energy literacy that will accelerate the energy transition across the state.

We’re going to have 1200 sets of ENERGETIC in January 2025, thanks to a mass production run. Our teacher workshop deck gives a more detailed overview of ENERGETIC. Our goal is to help make this rate of change increasingly plausible, with informed public support:

The steep dashed line represents NYC’s commitment in the C40 Deadline 2020 report.

We believe in speed, and our constant reference point is the report for New York, and other cities, by C40, from 2016, shown in the graphic above and at the link below. This report details the actual commitments in the Paris Agreement. It didn’t get much press, but NYC is technically a signatory to these commitments. Yet few people in New York understand the implications, or have been prepared for how we might accomplish it. See the absence of understanding the steps for the transition in the ‘before’ results in our survey, including from AP Physics students at New York’s top high schools. It’s not yet a familiar topic, though the transition should be happening at top speed now.

And so, it’s time to pick up speed:

C40 Cities | Deadline 2020: How cities will get the job done

That gap in broad public understanding is what we’re working to solve. Once people learn through their own exploration, by playing a collaborative game matched to the real world around them, they don’t forget what they’ve learned, and every political and technical step gets easier from that point on.


For follow-up reading, here are the key points from the NASEM report on public engagement:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25931.

More recommended reads:

Overcoming Obstacles in the Mid-transition to Clean Energy, interview with Emily Grubert


UK FIRES is a UK government-funded research project at Cambridge University with a series of reports redefining the path to achieving the Paris goals:



Why should today’s 12th graders gain an accurate understanding of climate and energy? Doing a better job with how we produce and use energy will mean a better outcome on climate.

Here is a clear and effective 30 minute talk from Stanford CISAC, 5/24, on the range of climate hazards facing 12th graders as they become adults: