How can we make this happen?
The difference is that in our world people do express desire to cooperate, also on a global scale, but reaching consensus seems like an intractable or practically unsolvable problem. Everybody knows that cooperating lies in their own self interest, but what does it effectively mean to cooperate?
It begins at different levels. For example, before we even begin to see disagreement on how to do the the things we want, we already have no consensus on what to do in the first place.
Good thing that old thought experiment isn't based on empirical evidence from the real world as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics showed us [1]. In both cases, it's in all participants interest as the GP said but there are some further conditions that Ostram outlined. It turns out in the real world, those conditions are met more often than not and can clearly met in this case.
As an individual I try to learn and improve minimizing my negative impact and working towards a sustainable business. But that is so small and insignificant in comparison to solving problems like these.
Maybe we have to think very long term and improve the effectiveness and reach of education. Maybe the hope is that future generations are smarter and more empathetic than us.
For two:
> But I don’t know the answers.
Very few people are able to do what you just did: realize that they do not actually know something (see: politics, covid, any culture war topic, etc). This is actually a sophisticated skill, and to say that we do not teach it would be a massive understatement.
> Maybe the hope is that future generations are smarter and more empathetic than us.
My concern is that even if they are much smarter at what we teach, if we're not teaching the skills that are needed (which may not be definitively known yet), we would still fail.
It seems entirely possible to me that humanity is a dead species walking, but we are simply not able to properly and broadly conceptualize that to the degree necessary to wake up and change course.