Climate Change: The mother of all Tragedy of the Commons

Photo by Ally Griffin on Unsplash

Climate change is the mother of all Tragedies of the Commons. It applies to the whole world and everyone in it.

It is unlike SO2 emissions in the US and haze in SE Asia, which are regional issues and can be mitigated with regional solutions.

Climate change has not only a larger spatial extent but a much longer temporal extent as well: its effects will be felt centuries into the future.

The reason climate change is hard to solve is because individuals and nations care about their own needs more than those of the collective global society. If everyone cared about the collective, we wouldn’t have this problem.

Ryan Chisholm, 1Dec2015, Singapore