Have We Done Enough To Fight Climate Change?

A look into Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” to understand of our efforts towards Climate Change issues

By: Viviane Fairbank, Staff Writer

When first told about the burden my generation will inherit, I was about 10. It was a playful comment made by the adults at the dinner table, mentioned on the fly to include young children in the conversation.

But after that, I began to hear the same remark at increasingly shorter intervals; I heard less and less humour in the announcers’ voices and more serious concern as years went by.

It was explained to me that I would find myself paying for the previous generation’s retirement, while my own was lost to a lack of funding. And the horror stories continued to grow: overpopulation, an inevitable loss of resources and even a third world war.

But the climate change crisis that would ultimately take effect in my lifetime has been steadily avoided in those conversations, perhaps because, unlike other problems, there is no direction to point one’s finger.

Climate change can easily be blamed on both everyone and at the same time, no one. A single person’s action — whether in the name of good or bad — is negligible in the grand scheme of things; climate change is a collective responsibility.

Or maybe it was also because those adults didn’t want to lose face in front of their children at the dinner table.

But regardless, the answer might just lie in an age-old theory by an ecologist who long preceded the current climate change debate.

The Situation

Struggles in Canadian politics are not always between politicians of rival parties, but also between what the government thinks is best and what the people want – an inevitable problem in a large democracy. This results in another gap: the one between what politicians say they want and what politicians do.

In the case of climate change, according to a poll that was released in April, 60 per cent of Canadians support protecting the environment, even at the risk of hampering economic growth. The majority of Canadians acknowledges that global warming is real and caused by man-made emissions.

The Canadian government, however, is more focused on the country’s economy, whether centered on money or on oil.

Canada dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2011. Peter Kent, environment minister, said that the decision would save the government approximately $14 billion.

But according to NDP environment critic Megan Leslie, quoted in CBC News, the government relinquished its involvement not just because of a budget, which she found to be inaccurate, but instead because Canada is “the kid who’s failing the class” when it comes to climate change responsibility.

Indeed, Canada has been unable to meet its targets when it comes to pollution reduction in the past decades.

In August of 2012, Kent released an Environment Canada report stating that Canada was halfway to its Copenhagen emission targets for 2020. The Copenhagen Accord, adopted after Harper rejected the Kyoto emission targets in 2006, committed Canada to reducing its emissions by 17 per cent from 2005.

Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party, remarks in her blog, however, that certain aspects of the Copenhagen Target, such as its start in 2005, as opposed to 2006, and its politically binding – as opposed to legally binding – nature, made it “little, weak and inadequate.”

She proceeds to show through calculation that Canada is in fact not close to halfway to reaching its targets. Either way, May points out, “by the deadline year of 2020, we will have failed to achieve the [Copenhagen] goal.”

Although Canada did reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, the decrease can primarily be explained by the world-wide recession, according to May.

Josh Laughren, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s climate change and energy program, confirms the urgency of action when it comes to global warming.

Emitted greenhouse gases, accumulating in the atmosphere at an increasing rate around the world, are changing our planet’s heat-balance, leading to an overall greater temperature, he says.

While “greenhouse gases are a good thing and a warmed climate is a good thing, it’s the rate and degree of change that are of concern,” Laughren says, adding that climate change could produce “potentially devastating consequences for all life on the planet, including our own.”

And yet, it seems that the rate and degree of interest in climate change is slowly passing us.

While polls and global activity show cognizance of a need for change, not nearly enough action is being taken to stop a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius, according to Laughren.

Laughren addresses this apparent human apathy when it comes to climate change. He explains that part of the reason for inaction is the distance between the present and the visible effects of such a present, 50 years from now.

“Our brains as a species have not evolved to deal with problems far into the future… it is a genuinely new challenge for our species,” Laughren says.

But this explanation does not account for the hundreds, thousands even, of advocacy groups around the world who have seen a fuzzy but frightening future, and who are fighting climate change.

When it comes to a lack of effectiveness of those groups, “there’s also a huge lot of people making a lot of money under the current system who are very loath to change,” Laughren says.

“An entire economic system has been built up on the burning of fossil fuels… it’s a hell of a ship to turn around. There is an incredible amount of inertia in the system.”

Nevertheless, if apathy and inefficiency do not loosen their grip and allow for us to take the bull by its horns, then we may soon enough not be in a position to care about our economic systems.

The Northwest Passage has been passable in the summer for several years already, and arctic communities are relocating because of melting permafrost. We’re seeing storms, droughts and flooding being exacerbated by climate change.

Even today, if over-pollution were to stop this very second, we would find ourselves with a 0.8 degree change, says Laughren. In a more realistic tone, if we were to massively decrease our pollution starting today, we would still be locking ourselves into well over one degree of increase – and we’re very close to two.

Though this may not seem like much of a change, Laughren says that a change of 6 degrees makes it hard “to even imagine a stable, well-functioning society as there is now.”

The Atmosphere as a Public Good

Sumeet Gulati, an associate professor at University of British Columbia, provides a reason for slow action regarding climate change that is very similar to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.”

Hardin, an American ecologist born in 1915, published several articles about the inability to sustain a public resource. In a 1968 article for Science magazine entitled The Tragedy of the Commons, he addressed the relevance of public ownership when it comes to pollution.

“The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them,” he wrote. “Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.”

This is exactly how the countries of the world are behaving with regard to greenhouse gases.

As Gulati explains, there is an idea that any action against climate change provides benefits not only to the acting country but to the rest of the world as well. No country wants to find itself spending money that benefits the world while other countries remain on the cheaper, more pollutant path.

“They want a free ride; let someone bear the costs and you get the benefits,” says Gulati, who specializes in agricultural economics.

As Hardin would argue, Gulati blames this problem primarily on the fact that the atmosphere is a common good; no specific person is responsible for it, and yet all stand to lose from it.

The tragedy of the commons in the atmosphere sees all countries continuing to pollute excessively in expectation that other countries will stop doing so first; but no country has stopped yet.

The problem is accentuated by the fact that not all countries suffer from global warming to the same degree at the same time. Though every country, every city, emits greenhouse gases separately, they all mix together once they are in the atmosphere.

“The atmosphere doesn’t care where the carbon molecule was emitted,” explains Laughren. “Arctic countries are hit first and hardest.”

He added that the territories following that would be the Maldese nations and coastal nations such as Bangladesh.

Though much of global warming is unpredictable and droughts and storms reach the entire world, the afflictions of climate change will reach many other countries later than others.

This lessens those countries’ “negative utilities,” as Hardin would call it, and make them more likely to pollute for their own economic benefit.

Thus, the tragedy of the commons persists. What Canada ejects into the air will affect other countries much more before it affects us, and so we wrongly persist as well.

What Would Hardin Advise?

Hardin suggests several applicable solutions in his articles.

“Freedom in a common brings ruin to all,” and consequently, regulation and moderation are necessary for progress, he says.

“Prohibition is easy to legislate,” Hardin writes, “but how do we legislate temperance?” He answers his own question by turning to administrative law and coercion, “agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”

These suggestions include the use of taxes, private property and the allocation of rights based on wealth, auction, merit, or lottery.

A couple of these concepts have already been applied to climate change, with varied response. The most popular form of regulation when it comes to pollution is the idea of carbon taxing.

“Carbon is the last source of pollution that we can freely dump,” says Laughren. “Internalizing the cost by pricing carbon is certainly a necessary precursor to solving climate change.”

Many are of the same opinion. A revenue-neutral carbon tax was implemented in British Columbia in the late 2000s, putting a price on carbon emissions in a hope to “encourage individuals, businesses, industry and others to use less fossil fuel and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a report by the Ministry of Finance.

This tax, which is currently at 6.67 cents a litre, was legislated by Gordon Campbell in 2008, making it North America’s first and only carbon tax, according to CBC News.

The Huffington Post wrote in an article about the expected long life of British Columbia’s carbon tax that experts and the provincial government have found it to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the province.

In light of the approaching elections in British Columbia this summer, the carbon tax is a prominent subject of debate. Many criticize the revenue-neutral aspect of the tax, meaning that all income made from the tax is used up by cuts in other taxes.

Adrian Dix, provincial leader of the NDP, is quoted by CBC News: “None of the money from the carbon tax goes to the environment or to pay for transit, and we think it should, so we’ve proposed that.”

Dix’s platform includes a $30-,$40- and $50-million investment plan from carbon tax revenue that will go towards supporting transit models and other green initiatives across the province.

While Gulati recognizes the potential of carbon taxes, he adds that we must still take into account the idea of the public good.

“The common [of climate change] is not just within our nation… global warming is in the world,” Gulati says.

“If I put a carbon tax and the rest of the world doesn’t, I can’t tax people’s exports coming into my country from the rest of the world. Then it’s a fairly straightforward argument that if my competitors don’t [put a carbon tax], I would be worse off.”

The tragedy of the commons comes back to bite us once again.

The only way to sidestep this problem is to have worldwide acceptance of policies, says Gulati, who has written several articles on international trade and sustainability.

He refers to the Montreal protocol, an agreement signed under the United Nations Environment Programme in 1987 pledging to eliminate global consumption and production of “ozone-depleting substances.”

Gulati says he sees this pact as hope that countries want to resolve climate change together.

“Unless everyone agrees to a carbon tax or a similar policy, there is a big concern,” says Gulati. “But because a lot of our economies aren’t purely reliant on our energy and electricity isn’t easy to trade, it may not be so hard.”

Hardin’s suggestion of private ownership as opposed to taxing becomes a bit more complicated; what can people own when it comes to climate change?

One interpretation of Hardin’s theory envisios a partial divvying up of sections of the atmosphere, to be owned by countries or industrial companies. But the fact that countries are not directly and proportionally affected by their own pollution calls for a different kind of action.

The state of California has implemented a cap-and-trade program similar to Hardin’s idea of right allocation. The program, which covers emissions from major sources such as refineries, power plants, industrial facilities and transportation fuels, distributes tradable allowances that are equal to the emission limited under an official gap, which will lessen over time.

Basically, Gulati explains, the state is “assigning property rights to emissions.”

“According to economics at the very basic level, [carbon taxing and the cap-and-trade system] should be equivalent,” he says, and emissions should then be regulated.

Gulati says a cap-and-trade method of regulation has its flaws, however. “Cap-and-trade is subject to lobbying and people end up getting these permits for free” and then selling them, says Gulati. “Administratively this is a problem.”

Very recently, the California Air Resources Board has combined its cap-and-trade program with a similar one in Quebec, helping the allocation system to spread across North America.

Whether criticized or embraced, Hardin’s solutions to the problem of public good have started to be applied across the world. We have found that the tragedy of the commons is a convincing way to look at the climate change situation with no bias, whether political or economic.

Nevertheless, while Hardin’s theory may be valid academically, many can dispute the application of philosophy to current public policy. It can be argued that philosophers, working with theory and not action (at times), are not able to account for the economical, social, or political aspects of the situation at hand, whether minute or substantial.

It is indeed hard to argue that philosophy can be applied to public policy without interference; while philosophical theories are (ideally) intelligent and logical, it may be that those who apply those theories are not. Details may be overlooked, greater issues misunderstood, or affected people disregarded.

Ingrid Stefanovic of the University of Toronto’s philosophy department admits to the complications that real life can add to a concrete issue.

“My own view is that we must do a better job of understanding peoples’ values, attitudes and perceptions and design multiple policy strategies in order to advance the goals of sustainability,” says Stefanovic, who specializes in environmental philosophy.

Stefanovic adds that there is a responsibility for philosophers to do more than “simply talk among themselves about abstract issues” and to help the transition from theory to action, stating that they must move “beyond the comfort of their own discipline” to advance solutions.

Stefanovic views environmental problems not only as an issue of public policy, but as a reflection of society’s value systems, and how they may need to be evaluated.

“Philosophers are well placed to take a leading role in helping us to understand and analyze values, attitudes and perceptions that underlie our current sustainable practices.”

Viviane Fairbank is a writer, photographer, and willing university student, desperately waiting to travel around the world.

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