Tragedy of the Atmosphere
The tragedy of the commons is the phenomenon that arises when shared resources are used inefficiently in societies. In class, we discussed a simple, allegoric example of this effect: cows grazing on a shared community field. In this example, when individuals try to use the shared resource too much, the community as a whole is harmed, and everyone loses. The solution is to regulate the use of the grazing field and to incentivise having cows graze less so as to not destroy the green for everyone. This phenomenon occurs in many places in the real world, but one of the most important is the environment – especially the maintenance of our atmosphere.
In the article “Managing Atmospheric Commons”, Oliver Tickell discusses the tragedy currently befalling our atmosphere. Carbon emissions have been sharply increasing over the recent decades and several protocols have attempted to find a way to curb individual greed in order to save the atmosphere. Tickell discusses several protocols that have failed in the past and proposes his own. These protocols all revolve around using some sort of credit for carbon emissions that companies need to acquire in some way to legitimize their carbon emissions. His proposed protocol, is to sell carbon permits directly to corporations, and to reinvest the money raised. This method would work well because it creates a cap on how much greenhouse gases can be emitted globally every year. This is a lot like what we learned in class because it attributes a cost to units slices of the resource in order to incentivise corporations to use it up less – ultimately saving the commons from destruction. An interesting difference between the simple example of the tragedy and this real world example is that not only the people polluting the atmosphere will be harmed if it is overused. There are countries that have very few carbon emissions but would still be devastated if global warming continues. Ultimately, this is a very complex problem that is made even more difficult by the systems already in place for energy production.
http://www.kyoto2.org/docs/the_land_1.pdf