09.30.06
The tragedy of the commons and global warming
I got to thinking more about the tragedy of the commons after commenting on the post about collaborative note-taking. In particular, as I posted the series on global warming, it struck me that the destruction of the planet’s climate is an example of the tragedy of the commons in operation: each company and each economy feels that its contribution to the destruction of the earth’s climate is just a fraction of what’s happening, and if it curbs its pollution and emissions of global warming gases, others will continue and prosper. So each company and each economy continues to destroy the climate and, moreover, fights attempts to control it.
Thus ExxonMobil does its best to confuse the issue so that no steps will be taken to fight global warming. Companies producing HFC134a (which has a thousand times the global warming effect as CO2) deny the evidence that HFC134a in the atmosphere is rapidly increasing: “Which are you going to believe, us or your stupid scientific instruments?”
Thus the planet’s climate may be irrevocably changed. Certainly our nation is not taking a leadership role in trying to reverse the effects and get control of the situation. We are just standing by, while a planet we’ve enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years goes through a wrenching change that will do us great harm.
