Tragedy of the Climate Commons

Climate scientists have long warned about the coming global-warming catastrophe. Still, they lament weak, if any, progress tempering the growth in worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions and the concomitant rise in average temperature for land and oceans by nearly 2 percent (above the 1951-1980 average) between 1880 and 2017. They insist that the temperature increase is largely attributable to human greenhouse-gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), which has increased by more than 60 percent since 1990, per U.S. government data crunched by the World Bank.

Even if the data are difficult to comprehend, scientists say that all people need to do is witness the retreats of glaciers and ice shelves in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles (vividly captured in NASA photographs), consider ominous reports of south-sea-island beaches gradually fading below waves, and note the expansion of the world’s deserts (captured in YouTube videos).

Given such evidence—and ominous predictions, like the recent United Nations climate report declaring that the global temperature will reach 2.7 degrees above preindustrial levels faster than previously thought—why hasn’t there been a more urgent move worldwide to curb emissions? It’s tempting to just blame corporations and government. But that ignores the behavior of the average human. By sounding alarms of the coming climate apocalypse, climate scientists could be inadvertently aggravating emissions growth and global warming, even if they are catching the attention of sympathetic policymakers.

The Tragedy of the Climate Commons

Former Vice president Al Gore insists that the global-warming threat continues apace because of politicians’ unwillingness to make emissions abatement a “moral imperative.” Many environmentalists attribute the threat to the greed of fossil-fuel industry capitalists who are (supposedly) willing to extract profits from sales until human life on Earth is no longer viable. In their more reflective scientific moments, however, most climate scientists seem to understand that the core problem underlying global warming is deep-seated and may be intractable, emanating from the very common tragedy of the commons.

The tragedy of the commons is a trap in which even well-meaning people can, acting independently, end up with an outcome (i.e., global warming) that no one wants. The tragedy occurs because, to paraphrase Cornell economist Robert Frank, people make “smart” individual decisions that end up being “dumb” for all. Moreover, when in the trap, everyone might prefer to incur a cost to get out because all can gain more than their costs. However, their “smart” decisions can have everyone else incur the cost of the remedies, which can result in a continuance of “dumb” decisions for all—meaning a continuance of global warming.

Well-recognized commons tragedies include polluted rivers, depleted aquafers, overfished oceans, city smog, and over-hunted species (bison, rhinos, and whales, for example). Even though abating these tragedies has involved only a subset of the world’s governments, their resolution has always been difficult. The tragedy of global-warming commons is far more problematic because the atmosphere is fully global in scope, and people’s emissions are fully integrated, which means that all people’s emissions can affect all others as emissions move globally with the trade winds.

In the case of global warming, people can reason that their individual uses of fossil fuels will have (effectively) no detectible effects on global atmospheric quality. Their individual emissions are the proverbial drop in a very large bucket—the global atmosphere. Consider two examples of the problem:

· The one billion smokers worldwide light 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year and release annually millions of tons of greenhouse gases. But in the coming years, few will quit expressly to curb global warming. Their individual lifetime puffs (or their quitting) will not consequentially affect the Earth’s temperature, so they will have little incentive to alter their individual behavior for the collective good of the world.

· Commuters in large cities can correctly reason that their individual commutes (or their absence) will not noticeably affect the extent of the smog and traffic congestion they must drive through (although all may grouse about both). So there will not be a rush of individual drivers feeling impelled to seek different transportation.

The problem of commons tragedies, especially global warming, is truly a paradox: All people’s inconsequential emissions become consequential when aggregated.

Granted, the social and economic consequences of global warming may, beyond some point, become so dire that peoples of the planet may be spurred to overcome their free-rider propensities. Climate scientists insist that global warming has such a “tipping point,” beyond which global warming will become self-perpetuating—and irreversible! Beyond the tipping point the rise in sea levels will lead to more moisture in the atmosphere, which will trap more of the Sun’s heat. The greater heat will speed up the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves and permafrost, which will release long-ago trapped CO2 and methane and lead to escalating cycles of reinforcing global warming—along with more frequent droughts, hurricanes, wild fires, more famines, and, aghast, beer shortages!

But timing is crucial: People may delay acting until the tipping point has passed—and some climate scientists speculate that either the tipping point has already passed or will pass within several decades, Even in the latter case, there are solid economic and political reasons to fear that the tipping point will pass before world governments can get their collective act together.

Solutions for Commons Tragedies?

Given the atmosphere’s fluidity, the global-warming problem requires global emissions curbs among many of the 195 countries in the world. Achieving agreement is an extraordinarily daunting problem, given the countries’ diverse interests. The difficulty is evident from the limited impact of international agreements to-date and the upward march of global emissions and temperatures, and the resulting wildfires, floods, and melting ice caps.

Similarly, because emissions curbs are costly, nations can be expected to “free ride” on the emissions curbs of other nations, which means relaxing their own emissions controls to achieve local goals. (Say, longer life expectancies or greater job and income growth: President Trump’s trumpeted explanation for relaxing U.S. emissions controls.) India’s environmental minister Prakash Javadekar insists that global warming is a problem for rich countries. India’s far greater problem is “eradication of poverty” through the construction of additional coal-fired electric generation plants, Javadekar has told the New York Times.

Global-warming treaty negotiations can stall as nations seek to pass off costs of emissions abatement to others. Poor countries can seek subsides from rich countries to cover their abatement costs, which can fuel opposition in rich countries to accepting international abatement strategies. Similarly, low-income groups within rich countries can also be expected to claim that they can’t afford the required income reduction that will accompany emissions constraints, arguing that the rich should pay more, which, of course, can fortify the rich’s opposition.

Energy industries can, of course, be expected to defend their companies’ profitability by lobbying against many emissions curbs, devising creative arguments for why their curbs are excessive and why other industries should incur more costs.

Individually, countries can oppose abatement regulations because they can drive up their industries’ production costs and drive globally mobile capital (especially financial and information capital), as well as production and jobs, to less costly production venues in countries less concerned about global warming. Some countries (say, the United States) can also reason that their emissions abatement programs can speed up global warming, given that their abatement can drive carbon-dense production processes to higher-polluting venues (say, China, India, or Malaysia). Research has showed evidence of this effect.

Russia, North Korea, and the United States will likely continue their military escapades, not considering the advent of some amorphous tipping point with each detonated bomb.

All polluting organizations can be expected to insist that their greenhouse-gas emissions contribute, on balance, net social value. NASA, for example, can be expected to argue that the blastoffs of its rockets, each of which spew many tons of greenhouse-gas emissions into the global atmosphere, have enormous scientific value. NASA assures all its recently launched Parker Solar Probe will help scientists understand our Sun’s “weather,” which can help preserve the lives of communication and weather satellites, while the emissions from its blastoff have had a “negligible” effect of global emissions.

Many people around the world will share the same refrains when challenged on their environmental policies: “Our emissions are inconsequential, as will be our curbs,” and “someone else should incur the costs of saving the planet.” The likely result? According to climate scientists, a continuance of a self-inflicted death march for humankind—with practically everyone insisting it’s all someone else’s fault. And when countries agree on emissions curbs, many can be expected to cheat and renege on the agreements when the costs of the curbs pile up and when they face threats of their plants and jobs moving elsewhere.

Such is the perverse logic and dismal nature of the tragedy of the biggest commons of all, the global atmosphere.

Doing the Right Thing

Of course, many people around the globe will do the “right thing.” They will buy smaller cars, curb their driving, eat less, buy fewer energy-dense plastic toys, and build fewer campfires, all in the name of saving the planet. However, there’s a strong likelihood that their collective efforts will be overwhelmed (as has been the case) by a far larger group of world citizenries who couldn’t care less or don’t care enough to act about the fate of the planet, and by a multitude of opposing global forces, not the least of which are continuing global growth in:

· population (projected to increase by 2 to 3 billion people by 2100),

· real income (which is projected to rise at a modest rate over the next several decades, according to the World Economic Outlook),

· sales of SUVs with more horsepower (with sales as a percent of all vehicle sales rising to 50 percent by 2020, up from 13 percent in 2013), and

· cruises (which have increased by a fourth since 2011).

All the while, carbon-based energy prices can be expected to fall in real terms with discoveries of new economically retrievable sources. To the extent that international agreements reduce the demands for carbon-based energy prices, their prices can be expected to fall, at least partially neutralizing any curbs in quantity consumed.

Abating global warming requires individuals and individual nations to be charitable, which means incurring emission-abatement costs largely for the benefit of people around the globe. Many people obviously have charitable inclinations to donate time and income to social causes, especially local ones. However, their beneficence can be expected to fade as beneficiaries become ever more distant. The impact of most people’s charity is hard to detect when the issues are global in scope, and global warming is … well, global in scope

As an indication of how much people may be charitably inclined to abate voluntarily their own emissions, consider that U.S. giving by individuals in 2017 was only $287 billion, or a meager 2 percent of gross domestic product, and 44 percent of their donations went to their churches, predominantly for congregational interests, according to Giving USA 2018. Americans voluntarily gave last year a meager $12 billion to “environmental and animal” causes. Corporations were less charitable, spending in 2017 less than $17 billion on “socially responsible causes,” just 0.9 percent of their pre-tax profits, again, according to Giving USA 2018.

Scientists and policymakers alike should understand that people will tend to offset partially, if not totally, the effectiveness of emissions curbs. When car manufacturers are forced to increase the fuel economies of combustion engines or substitute electric cars, the cost of miles driven will fall, inducing people to drive more miles. Behavioral economists have also shown that people tend to engage in “mental accounting,” which means they establish a “budget” for, say, emissions. When forced to curb car emissions, people can “spend” unused emissions balances to run their air conditioners longer or to buy more plastic toys from foreign shores.

Looming Doom and Popular Opinion

Climate scientists have won the global-warming debate in the sense that more than 80 percent of Americans believe human emissions over the past 150 years is a major cause of climate change, according to a survey from Yale University. However, they’ve failed making their case in the sense that, according to a Gallup poll, more than half of Americans still don’t think climate change will affect them in their lifetime—despite scientists’ continuous insistence that the effects of climate change are now a part of daily life everywhere.

Scientists, however, seem to have failed to fully appreciate that both global warming and its abatement emerge from the same economic trap, the tragedy of the (global-climate) commons. In this trap, even well-meaning people—true believers—can be led (as if by an “invisible hand”) to do the wrong thing, which is to do too little, individually, to abate global warming. Both climate-change believers and doubters are buying large SUVs in record numbers and cranking up their air conditioners when heat waves move in. Both share a common justification: “My emissions are inconsequential.”

Climate scientists could be spurring some policymakers to take up their cause, but they could also be worsening, albeit inadvertently, global warming by their ominous rhetoric of pending climate doom. They can be making their gloomy predictions self-realizing when they argue, with scientific conviction, that the tipping point has already been passed, or soon will be—and therefore people have little incentive to pitch in individually

Many people (and governing bodies) can be expected to ask themselves, “If global warming is irrevocable and doom is all but certain, what’s the use of our throttling our lifestyles in the name of emissions reductions? Why not buy the big new SUV or take the bucket-list trip to the Galapagos Islands?”

Concluding Comments

Are we doomed? Not necessarily. There is the (long-shot) prospect that the consensus among scientists on global warming is wrong. Climate scientists may have been pushed by political and academic forces to exaggerate the extent of global warming in the past and future. The “lukewarmers,” such as science writer Matt Ridley, are climate scientists and journalists who accept anthropomorphic global warming as scientific fact, but who insist that future global warming, and its effects, will be more moderate (with the mean global temperature rising less than 2 degrees by the end of the century) and less calamitous.

If the consensus view on climate science is right on global warming but off the mark in terms of the close-at-hand time frame or magnitude of the consequences for human survival, then there is room for hope. The tipping point may then be set back for a century or more, which will give peoples of the world more time to devise corrective policies and overcome their commons tragedy.

But don’t be so sanguine. Any accepted delay in the advent of the tipping point and moderation of consequences may cause many people to relax and enjoy in the meantime the fruits of increased emissions.

The greater hope for humankind is that climate scientists are wrong on their conclusion that global warming is anthropomorphic and has been, and will continue to be, caused by natural forces emanating from, say, slight changes in the Earth’s tilt toward the Sun or its orbit around the Sun, oscillations in volcano eruptions, and so forth. There is at least some slender prospect that the natural forces will reverse course with the prospects of human extinction ameliorated, at least for a time. The sad news is that climate scientists profess conviction that salvation by changes in natural forces is a collective pipedream. Besides, reversals of natural forces will take millennia.

Perhaps climate scientists should do something that doesn’t come naturally to them: Pray that the commons-tragedy trap isn’t what it’s been cracked it up to be. After all, in 1798, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus posited the coming “population bomb” (not his phrase) that would detonate around the globe in the coming 19th century, but which was diffused by a technological revolution. However, reluctant pessimists should remember the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” That technological revolution (encouraged by governments, or so science historians insist) was the seedbed for the Industrial Revolution, which climate scientists now assure us was the fossil-fuel seedbed of the now coming “climate bomb.”