To fully conceive of Gathering Storm, the second expansion for Civilization VI, you must understand that it has two core components: the gathering and the storm. The gathering is an extension of the diplomatic systems from Civilization: Rise and Fall, and the storm is the mounting cataclysm of climate change. It's not a coincidence that the game affiliates these two topics. The pollution wilting forests and melting icebergs was leeched into the atmosphere by every major industrialised nation. Therefore, it will take the collaboration of the major industrialised nations to solve. And if states have international meetings about how to conserve Earth's ecosystem, those same roundtables can sign other diplomatic securities, from international trade accords to weapons conventions. The emergence of global relations is a deeply engraved hallmark of Modernity, and any retelling of this period is incomplete without it.

Ecologically, Gathering Storm asks the same question that Civ's 2014 spin-off, Beyond Earth, did. With every new save in Civilization: Beyond Earth, we decide whether we want to transform the planet we land on or transform ourselves. But Beyond Earth is asking that question about an exoplanet. It's a speculative exercise in what it means to colonise other worlds and suggests that what we call terraforming could also be called ecocide. Beyond Earth realises the dream of modern technocrats: that we might solve the climate change crisis by jumping into an interstellar moving van. However, this techno-optimism has also become an escape clause in the contract we have with the environment.

Because there are tech executives looking for a DLZ on a distant rock and because living on one would require the application of science, pulling the ripcord on our planet is often identified as the "rationalist's" solution to the climate crisis. However, it's not rationalist to deny the enormity of the bioengineering obstacles involved in colonising other worlds. If you can't keep the air fit to breathe and the food fit to eat on the planet we evolved in sync with, how do we think we're going to do it on a dry, airless ball of dust over a hundred million miles from all other civilisation? Assuming you could, if finding new lodgings is our only solution to natural decline, then all we have is a cynical slash-and-burn attitude to our point of origin masquerading as idealism.

As Beyond Earth spotlights, if planets are as disposable as napkins, any outworld would also become one more squat to trash. Environmentalist management games like Gathering Storm and Terra Nil don't let us kick the can down the road. In these activity packs, as in Beyond Earth, there is an environment to be engineered for our habitation, but it's not Mars or Proxima Centauri b; it's our homeworld. Because we, in real life, are already answering whether we'll change our planet or change ourselves.

Land Features and Natural Disasters

Early on in matches, Gathering Storm realises and connects us to our home by having civilisations name the land features they discover. Where you once would have sailed "the sea", you now sail the Aegean Sea or the Bering Strait. You cannot blast through some abstraction of mountains; they're the North York Moors or the Lebombos. There are also material reactions. Build a city by a volcano, and it may erupt, lava melting through walls and decimating your population. Pump millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere and watch rising sea levels smother your shorelines. Natural disasters in Gathering Storm serve the same function as they do in SimCity. Storms, droughts, and the like leave you with building to do, even in "finished" boroughs. It keeps you busy long after the incipient stage of your society.

In my Rise and Fall blog, I said that no one wants to repeat a task they've just completed, but the natural disasters don't run afoul of this rule because:

1. There is usually a long gap between us completing a construction and needing to repair it.
2. We don't have to reinstall every District and building when climate change wreaks havoc on a city. We simply need to fix what has been damaged and can forget everything else.
3. A player can set the intensity of these destructive events or even whether the play includes them. The relevant slider is in the setup menu.
4. Floods, eruptions, and storms often gift us with perks on the back end, like soil irrigation, which will lead to increased crop growth.
5. Because leaders can affect the quantity of greenhouse gases in the air, they have a degree of control over the disasters, which is often not how it goes in SimCity.

It's the partial autonomy over the weather events that makes for a simulation of anthropic climate change. Geologists split the planet's history into "epochs" with names like the "Middle Devonian" or the "Paleocene". Some environmentalists propose that we are living through an epoch they call the "Anthropocene". Using the prefix "anthropo", meaning "human", the name of this unit of time is chosen to suggest that we cannot think of this age like those that preceded it.^[2][3] It is the first time that humans have influenced the Earth's ecology.^[2] Most media do not take place on a timescale protracted enough for us to watch the ravages of industrialisation take hold, but Civ, with its 5,000-year matches, does.

To Gathering Storm, the goal of healing the Earth is not to expunge climate cataclysm. In this expansion, floods and droughts beset cities and farms long before the first smokestack starts coughing soot into the big blue, and that's historically accurate. Think about how far back flooding had to happen for it to inspire the myth in Genesis or the Mesopotamian epics. When canvassing for environmental consciousness, it is a mistake to attribute all devastating weather events to climate collapse or to lyricise about returning to a harmonious symbiosis with nature. When we close our eyes to the latent violence of the organic, we open the door to climate change denialism. Denialists say that natural disasters always happened, and so, nothing has gone that intolerably awry during the Anthropocene. To them, the environmentalist hunger is for a peace that can never exist.

An honest and realistic counterargument starts with some inconvenient acknowledgements, acknowledgements that Gathering Storm makes. We don't know how to stop natural disasters reducing apartments to rubble or wiping out entire crop harvests. The things we have control over and, therefore, must take action on, are the frequency and average severity of these events. Although, this expansion is reluctant to show the disturbing extremes that severity can reach, as it would grind gameplay to a halt.

In this simulation, the after-effects of climate catastrophe often trend in a positive direction because the designers do not want to sour players with random, purely adverse occurrences. Additionally, if players reached the Information Era to find that robust Food production and a population without heatstroke were things of the past, meeting any kind of victory condition would be impossible. Unless, that is, you want to limp to the finish line like a beetle without its back legs. There are also environmental cliff edges that Gathering Storm doesn't want to systemise. You've seen the lighthouse beacon from the IPCC warning us not to warm the atmosphere 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. One of the logical underpinnings behind that target is that there are thresholds beyond which global warming creates positive feedback loops, leading to a Formula One acceleration of the heating.

For example, ice shelves are white, meaning they bounce potentially warming sunlight off of our planet. Therefore, if Arctic sea ice melts, less sunlight is reflected, and the oceans absorb more heat. The result is a higher global temperature, melting more ice, which means fewer reflectors, and we're stuck on a roundabout.^[4] Forests are carbon sinks, estimated to absorb around 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 a year and store 861 billion tonnes of carbon. However, climate change is burning down trees, which releases carbon and reduces the net CO2 capture, which causes further warming, which burns more forests.^[5] You see where this is going.

Gathering Storm does let you dig yourself holes. In one of my first experiments with it, I tarred the planet with emissions before going through the decarbonisation steps. I was dismayed and confused to find that my countries were still afflicted by dire weather events on the other side. Checking my dashboards, I realised that I'd missed an incredibly obvious detail: curtailing your output of greenhouse gases doesn't remove them from the air. We've come to view net zero as the be-all and end-all of climate action, but if we could reach it by just snapping our fingers, it wouldn't make the globe any cooler. Not immediately and not in itself. This is why it's so important that we don't release insulators in the first place. While Gathering Storm gamifies the persistence of greenhouse gases and even exaggerates their permanence by leaving trees unable to reabsorb them, combining that scarring with "tipping points" would likely be a bridge too far. The developers want to give you some chance of pulling yourself back out of the fossil fuel pit once you've fallen in. If you couldn't, you wouldn't even get to taste the new Science Victory.

The Updated Science Victory

In stupid old Civ VI, if you wanted to become the Einstein of empires, you had to work through a stack of intensive innovations, from launching a satellite to completing the Mars Habitation Project. A pop-out screen gave you a rough impression of how close each other society was to going full Federation. The direct strategy to reach the red planet was also not that complicated: you operated your ersatz NASA out of whichever city had the highest Production capacity. It made what should have been the most consequential project of your civilisation feel small and confined to a single tile.

In Gathering Storm, you ascend a Jacob's ladder of rocketry, but it culminates in a spacecraft that you must propel 50 light-years (about 300 trillion miles) to reach a habitable planet outside our solar system. Every player can see how many light-years everyone else's ship has on the clock, and you can speed up your vehicle's transit by commissioning Laser Stations in Spaceport Districts. Instead of one giant leap at the end of the space race, there's a fine grading in the 50 light-years, allowing for an edge-of-your-seat photo finish.

The exoplanet expedition also becomes a nationwide collaboration that can be conducted in a range of patterns. You can now have multiple cities launch stations to help your brave explorers reach their Eye of the Universe. For the first time, you have a say in how many cities contribute to the odyssey to the exoplanet and how many will be left over for other essentials like manufacturing or fending off enemies. You also have choices about whether you would like to start building a Spaceport or Laser right now or whether you want to bolster your city's productive muscle with a new Factory or Power Plant first. Terrestrial and Lagrange Laser Stations munch Power and Aluminium, respectively, giving you options about what resources you acquire and spend to establish celestial supremacy. You must coordinate your mining, trade, and energy sectors for your exodus.

If this all sounds a bit sci-fi for Civilization, recall that during the sovereignty of Civ V, porting the futurist concepts out to another game (Beyond Earth) got a tepid reception. What's more, laser-propulsion isn't future tech. Some real satellites already have "solar sails" and drift through the vacuum on headwinds of light.^[6] Photons can exert force on a body; we just don't encounter it much in our everyday because the push is pathetically weak.^[7] Yet, currently, researchers from UC Santa Barbara and an independent team at Breakthrough Initiatives have been exploring the possibility of using a concentrated beam of photons (a laser) as an interstellar pool cue.^[6][8] Being a propulsion source external to the crafts, the lasers can't weigh them down, and could propel a 100kg ship about 300 times faster than the Voyager spacecraft. The technology is a long way off if it arrives at all, but scientists view it as maybe our best shot at making the expedition to Alpha Centauri, as we do in Gathering Storm.^[6]

The Future Era

Gathering Storm drags mainline Civ in a more speculative direction than ever with its Future Era. This epilogue to our current reality, the Future Era takes matches from ending, at the latest, in 2020 to terminating as late as 2050. Like any other slice of time, it has its regional technologies and social structures: Cybernetics, Seasteads, Smart Power Doctrines, etc. However, this time, the layouts of the Tech and Civics trees are randomised, and everything but our next immediate research option on each branch is hidden. This was actually Sid Meier's original plan for the Civilization I Tech tree. He wanted to put players in the place of historical figures who had no idea what the future of inventions might hold or what the exact consequences of creating new technologies would be.^[9]

The fathers of masonry would never have imagined the Pyramids, and the founders of ballistics didn't mix chemicals with the idea that one day there would be jet fighters. Hell, the complete concepts of "masonry" and "ballistics" didn't exist at their conception. Technologies are mostly discovered by accident, and their applications elucidated in retrospect. Unfortunately, if you made that the case in Civ, it would hamper meaningful planning on the players' part, which is not a small flaw for a strategy game. The occluded Tech tree does, however, fly in Gathering Storm because, by the Future Era, you have already been able to plan most of the Tech and Civics that underlie your empire. You also can't ruin a following Era because there is no following Era. This is zero hour.

As this expansion about climate change needs diplomacy, it also needs the extra thirty years because that's where the payload of our current climate decisions will hit. If there is no future, then there's nothing to lose and nothing to save. Our survival instincts lie and tell us that no society would opt for a death march towards the finish line, but Civilization has some ideas about why some do.

Firstly, you know that polluting brings you benefits now and that the bill for it won't come until a long time down the road. When you're not in the thick of it, you can say, "I would never burn megatonnes of coal just for the sake of productive industry", but if you want to be the world's greatest civilisation and you're trying to keep up with India which started chooming carbon like it's going out of fashion, you're going to follow suit. That is to say that if you are married to the national supremacist ideology I criticised a few weeks ago, you have an impetus to deface our home.

Even if you weren't aiming to "win history", the civilisation that doesn't maximise its energy output can be cannibalised by the nations that do. In a world of power grids, electricity is productivity. As long as you keep burning fossilised trees and fermented fish, every time you invent a technology that requires a jump in raw voltage, you induce a comparable jump in pollution. Other technologies, like planes and railroads, skip the middleman and directly treat the sky as their landfill. The Future Era is a wake-up call that these elevations in power demand are not about to stop either.

The International Energy Agency predicted that from 2022 to 2026, there will be a 160 to 590 TWh increase in global electrical demand from data centres, cryptocurrencies, and "AI". In the IEA's words, that's the rough power equivalent of "at least one Sweden".^[10] That growing appetite represents technological expansions and upgrades. In Gathering Storm, the new Science Victory condition is designed to interact with this problem of pollution, as the Terrestrial Lasers can quickly add up to become power hogs. Common sense tells us green energy is the next step after fossil fuels, like cars are the next step after horses. However, in one game of Civ, I surprised myself when I regressed from nuclear fission to Oil because I didn't have the Uranium to simultaneously power my Terrestrial Lasers and my watchful Giant Death Robots.

The second reason we can end up polluting: we forget about the sharp tip of climate change and think of it as abstract science. We do this because we cannot make exact predictions about when and how the climate will collect its debt. If we were Poland and knew that when we built an oil plant, it would start a hurricane in Gdansk in 2035, we might seek an alternative source of electricity. But we can't know that; we are simply aware there will be hell to pay somewhere at some time. And even if we could set a stop clock and place a map pin for the danger, it feels less real when it has RSVPed for 30 or 40 years in the future.

Thirdly, perhaps you didn't burn the forests and swell the oceans, but that won't necessarily save you from being trapped in a burning house. Gathering Storm appreciates that impoverished nations disproportionately pay the price for the decisions of the rich. In 2024, Mali couldn't exhale a fraction of the CO2 that China does, but it's all one globe. The carbon doesn't stay in China, and neither does the heat.

If you are the poorer civilisation, you may also not have access to the Uranium for clean nuclear power. That can happen either because you are not up to the acquisition of it or because you've been banned from holding it by international parties who fear you'll use it for weaponry. Wind and solar can provide a green wellspring of power, but only if you're technologically advanced enough to build it. Worse, the lower your GDP is, the less productivity and money you have to defend your coasts against floods or rebuild after hurricanes. If you do have some greenbacks in the bank, another nation's carbon footprint can even become a reason to invade them. If you don't stop their reckless pollution, your nation could have its jaw broken by the resultant disasters.

If you become wedged in the dirty business of greenhouse gases, it's difficult to grease yourself out of there. In Gathering Storm, it's as simple as directing some Builders to erect some Wind and Solar Farms and taking a few turns to convert Oil and Coal ovens to nuclear. In reality, it's a little more complicated than that. Greenhouse gases also don't just come from trains, some military units, and Power Plants, as they do in Civ. They're built into our entire transport networks, including all of global trade and travel, as well as our livestock.^[11]

We might appeal to carbon capture to save our sorry butts, but for the time being, that's a pipe dream. When the general public says "carbon capture", they generally imagine what Gathering Storm calls "Carbon Recapture": taking CO2 already in the air and trapping it. The industry term for this process is "DAC" or "Direct Air Capture".^[12] But DAC neutralises about 0.00002% of the carbon released annually at an estimated cost of $200-$650 per tonne of CO2.^[12][13] Keep in mind that in 2023 alone, approximately 37.4 billion tonnes of humanmade CO2 entered the atmosphere. Industrialists talk a big game about what carbon straws will suck up in five or twenty years and at what price, but they've repeatedly misled us about what future tech is about to come down the pike, including in the case of other forms of carbon capture.^[14]

As Gathering Storm depicts, viable DAC is hypothetical tech, currently only a figment of the Future Era, and remains on too high a shelf for countries that are economically and technologically poor. As it stands, captured carbon dioxide is also often deployed in further oil production.^[14] In Civ, if we research universal carbon containment, it will come, but in reality, there are no guarantees. It's another technology that, like rocket ships to Mars, we're told will save the world imminently, but only as long as we keep the people dooming the world in power a little longer. The CEO of perhaps the leading DAC company said that this "green" tech is a strategy to extend the life of the oil, coal, and gas industries.^[14] It wouldn't be the first time.

That doesn't mean net zero is impossible, however. One of the strange things about politicians is that they generally talk as if knowing how to strike that bullseye is some big mystery to be solved. We've understood how to instantiate renewable alternatives to dirty energy and decarbonise agriculture for decades. Which brings me to why Civ, for all of its germane observations, can't really discuss the problem of power washing our roads and skies. The series has all macro decisions in a society made by the head of state and too frequently believes their remits apply solely to the empire in which they are made.

The World Congress

It's not that Gathering Storm is wholly denialist of transnational politics. From the Renaissance Era onwards, a World Congress convenes to vote for or against bills that govern all leaders. The council can also decide key articles of that legislation. This is an alternate history version of the UN, albeit it available a little early, given the state of travel and communications technologies during the Renaissance, but one where all resolutions are legally binding. Example resolutions include:

• Great Works of an elected type (e.g. Portrait, Landscape Painting, Sculpture) generate +100% Tourism.
• A target player will generate 50% fewer Grievances against other players, and other players will generate 50% fewer Grievances against them.
• No civilisation may construct coal plants.

The World Congress does not respect a one-nation, one-vote system or even proportional representation. Instead, players spend "Diplomatic Favor" to obtain the number of votes they think necessary for each motion. Because the votes of other empires don't get displayed until they've all been counted, the World Congress is a betting pool. The tension sizzles as you make educated guesses about the appropriate amount of diplomatic bloodletting to out-tithe the enemy. You may target one proposal as a resource sink because you think another leader is likely to fight you on it or keep your powder dry during a session because you want to save your votes for next time.

In the real UN and comparable assemblies, it's common to hold forums where every country gets a vote. Therefore, we could accuse Gathering Storm of villainisation, but with the Diplomatic Favor system, the expansion sees past procedure and interrogates where power lies. Even in "global democracies", who has monopolised valuable resources or who carries a big stick are determinants of outcomes. Often bigger determinants than how many ballots each country cast. We'll come back to this.

The Diplomatic Victory

Any well-developed area of activity in Civ deserves a Victory type to match, and Diplomacy is no exception. It is the most eccentric of the win conditions. Every other path to the trophy involves performing one action many times. For Science, you keep building the space race projects. For Domination, you keep capturing capitals. For Religion, you also keep taking capitals, just in a different way. Arguably, the Cultural Victory is more diffuse with its National Parks, Sea Resorts, Great Works, etc., but most of what you do for Culture is put something worth travelling to in a Museum or place it on a map. There is the all-encompassing Score Victory, but this is not something players tend to pursue as a deliberate goal, as there's the chance someone will reach one of the other explicit victory conditions first.

But the Diplomatic Victory is an express destination and has you striving for goals as incomparable as:

• Erecting the Mahabodhi Temple, Statue of Liberty, or Potala Palace.
• Voting for Diplomatic Victory Points in the World Congress.
• Coming out on top in the World's Fairs or global sporting competitions.

Those are the main inroads, at least, and there's not a single manoeuvre that connects all these dots. They're as scattered as stars. Players of this final expansion are likely to be those with the most hours logged in Civ VI, so a victory condition that requires you learn byzantine rules is fair enough. To win votes in the alternate UN, you'll need oodles of Diplomatic Favor. In addition to grappling Diplomacy Points, votes are also what initiate World's Fairs and the Olympics substitutes. How do we curry Diplomatic Favor? Again, the answer's all over the shop: Alliances with other Civs, building Pagodas on Holy Sites, being the Suzerain of city states, avoiding or reversing pollution, and refraining from toting up Grievances are just some of the orders of the day. Deep breath.

Gathering Storm is more hopeful than I am that leading diplomats will extend courtesies to you for scrubbing the atmosphere or staying your hand over the cannons. The history in these matches doesn't have to look exactly like our own, but elsewhere, the expansion is concerned with making our journey replicable. In the international delegations, it can lose that thread. For us, the G20 and G7 summits concentrate the most diplomatically powerful nations in the world in one spot but are notorious for making fractional to no progress on the climate. The US has more authority to direct global finances and legislation than anyone else, and it's world champion in pollution and violent intervention. Other countries have their Grievances with the US, but that doesn't mean they don't get to call the shots.

Grievances

Grievances replace the "Warmonger Status" from base Civ VI as the measure of animosity between world leaders. Pre-Gathering Storm, the international community would give you a classification from harmlessly peaceful to detestably violent. While there are a minority of leaders who won't be put off by a few bloodstains on your robes (shoutout to Montezuma the First), other civilisations will generally be less willing to trade or ally with a warmonger and will take up a more aggressive posture towards them. Drawn-out armed engagements and wars without some acceptable pretence will incur harsher penalties, while returning cities to their owners and simply waiting can cause the stink of violence to fade slowly.

The warmonger mechanic's weakness was that it was never spelt out how far you could go before jumping the fence from nuisance to despot or whether you'd have a chance of redeeming yourself in foreign eyes any time soon. Grievances put a number to how much ire or benevolence presidents and monarchs reserve for you, and in some scenarios, how much you stand to lose or gain if you should foster or betray the relationship. For example, the UI might relay that the Scythians have 10 Grievances against you and that declaring a Holy War against them would mark you with another 50 Grievances.

This clarification of international relations is the right move when we are expected to do more handshaking and treaty signing than ever. But Gathering Storm stops short of complete implementation and thereby leaves us in the dark about diplomatic consequences. While every form of war has a minus number painted under it in red, the banners and widgets don't tell me how many Grievances I'll accrue per turn for occupying a capital or how many I'll shed for gifting gold to a wronged party. You can't even memorise the amounts you gain or lose for each action because many of them are calculated on the fly using a secret formula.

A Little Privacy

Even if Civ was more forthcoming about how to diplomatically exchange with other overseers, many of the real causes of climate change are external to governments. They cannot be depicted in a model where the solution to pollution is always leaders cleaning house and pressuring neighbours. See, gameplay where the head of state dictates energy policy is fine if the mode of administration you're trying to depict is monarchism, imperialism, or totalitarianism. Even under those systems, there are a lot of viziers pushing each other aside for a turn at the wheel, but I'm willing to grant some artistic license. However, coming out of the 19th century and through the 20th century, governments leeched their power to private enterprises. There are majority state-owned oil companies that do horrific damage to the planet, like Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco or Russia's Gazprom. Still, the lion's share of the pollution happens in or is financially backed by the private sector.

The most demonic of those private interests, the Shells and JP Morgan Chases, don't belong to one country. They are multinationals, hovering over and between nations like flying saucers, and the preservation of the planet is contingent on governments casting out these evil spirits. One of the reasons that the "World Congresses" of our timeline fail to move the needle on global warming is that without a full-throated rejection of the apocalypse industry, dripping in its black and gold, world leaders end up, at best, failing to place a red dot on the target, and at worst, actively doing their bidding. If you were willing and able to stop the profiteers running the show, you wouldn't give your blessing to a capitalist economy. Letting profiteers run the show is the definition of a capitalist economy.

Civilization only knows power that flows from a throne, executive office, or sometimes insurgent gun barrel. Therefore, it can't describe all the forces a nation would need to battle to save the seas, the jungles, and every organism that dwells within them. Gathering Storm's belief in being able to get anything ecological done under "Corporate Libertarianism" is also right out. To Firaxis, a government is a series of Policy slots and points modifiers that a player picks, but in the real world, the form of government also decides who the player is.

Conclusion

Games have a unique role to play in educating us, one that no other medium can. Frequently, calibrating the best human environment means correctly tuning systems: financial systems, political systems, ecosystems. However, as systems do not have characters or plots, narrative media can struggle to trace their edges. Games are the only widely popular form of systemic media and, therefore, can be windows into how different configurations of systems lead to different results.

As one of the deepest and most decorated games featuring climate change in the 2010s, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm should be lauded for drawing attention to the destruction of our planet. We are being boiled alive, and yet we're sometimes inexplicably nonchalant about it. Gathering Storm is proudly not. However, the expansion fails to encompass the full scope and carnage of climate collapse. I worry that if anyone took Gathering Storm's message to heart, they would learn that the coming droughts and storms are entirely endurable as long as we batten down our hatches and refactor a few legal codes. The truth is that we are slowly choking and cannot stop our vision fading and our limbs going weak without drastic rectification of our energy, transport, and agriculture. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. This article is based on Civilization VI version 1.0.12.68, released in July 2024.
2. Anthropocene Epoch by John P. Rafferty (November 22, 2024), Britannica.
3. Anthropo- by Collins English Dictionary Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed 30 November 2024), Collins English Dictionary.
4. Arctic Feedbacks by Jen Kay, Ariel Morrison, and Barbara MacFerrin (September 21, 2017), YouTube.
5. 6 Graphics Explain the Climate Feedback Loop Fueling US Fires by Nancy Harris, Thailynn Munroe, and Kelly Levin (September 16, 2020), World Resources Institute.
6. Photonic Propulsion by SciShow (March 8, 2016), YouTube.
7. Can light exert a force to move an object? by Kerstin Göpfrich (October 24, 2016), The Naked Scientists.
8. Concept by Breakthrough Initiatives Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed November 30, 2024), Breakthrough Initiatives
9. Sid Meier's Psychology of Game Design by Sid Meier (October 16, 2016), YouTube.
10. Çam, E. et al. (2024). Electricity 2024: Analysis and forecast to 2026. International Energy Agency (p. 31).
11. Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions by sector by Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (January 2024), Our World in Data.
12. Direct Air Capture by Sara Bundis (April 25, 2024), International Energy Agency.
13. 6 Things to Know About Direct Air Capture by Katie Lebling, Haley Leslie-Bole, Zach Byrum, and Liz Bridgwater (May 2, 2022), World Resources Institute.
14. Why carbon capture needs a reality check by Deutsche Welle (August 30, 2024), YouTube.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.