Whereas if the US consumer stop buying oversize trucks and stop flying cross country for social events, they will actually save money!
It's simply not equatable to expect a poor country like South Africa to make sacrifices while the US (a rich country) refuse to levy a carbon tax.
I’m not sure why everyone talks about flying. It’s a rounding error.
I never realized South Africa was such a big emitter of CO2.
It only has 15 coal power plants?
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-taken-cour...
Methane emission from the oil industry is another "rounding error". By your logic we should just ignore it.
The solution is obvious: Just levy a carbon tax and let the markets sort it out.
Isn’t that the way it’s usually done?
“Let’s get everyone in the world to ride a bicycle”
What sort of solution is this?
The best way to solve this "tragedy of the commons" problem is through a tax where a market system can determine what should be changed.
Yes, the article is not a realistic solution, but neither is closing coal plants (without replacing them with something else).
Taxation is also a grand top down view of the economy.
You've got to figure out the details of an equitable amount. Do different countries pay different amounts? Are there subsidizes for the poor? Are other greenhouse gases, like nitrous oxide, also included, and at what rate? If someone doesn't pay, how is the tax enforced?
All those are part of a grand vision.
Just like the grand top down view wherein "nationalists and communists" decided to ban most CFC emissions. And the "nationalists and communists" who decided to ban commercial whaling, outside of a few nations.
How would the superior capitalistic system have solved those problems? It's not like the capitalistic system is doing that great a job of preserving commercial fishing.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" was based on a fairy-tale interpretation of history. The far greater tragedy occurred due to the commons owners enclosing the land and breaking commoner's rights of use.
A.k.a. "capitalism".
There are many reasonable answers and proposals to these questions.
Here's one: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/
The EU has already placed a price on some emissions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tra...
Wikipedia says "In economics and in an ecological context, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,[1][2] act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources". That is not a fairy tale.
Read more of that Wikipedia article, including "heavily criticized, particularly by anthropologists and historians":
> Critical scholars note that although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.
as well as the criticism section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Critici... with:
> Radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen claims the tragedy of the commons is used as propaganda for private ownership.[189][190] He says it has been used by the political right wing to hasten the final enclosure of the "common resources" of third world and indigenous people worldwide, as a part of the Washington Consensus
and
> Tragedy of the commons has served as a pretext for powerful private companies and/or governments to introduce regulatory agents or outsourcing on less powerful entities or governments, for the exploitation of their natural resources.
The tragedy of the commons is a parable that advocates neither capitalism nor socialism. It advocates the existence of a _responsible manager_ for any resource subject to exhaustion. Whether that manager should be a capitalist owner or a public entity is a separate question that comes in later.
And of course, it is entirely irrelevant whether the events described really happened. The broken window fallacy doesn't refer to one particular window-breaking incident.
Anyway, the concretization of the parable to the subject at hand is actually very straightforward: the atmosphere is the commons, and the carbon emitters are the commoners. Enclosures are an impossible solution this time, because we need to let the air to circulate freely. But the parable still teaches us the need for a single entity to be on charge of the atmosphere. National-level solutions - much less individual action - can only be a delaying tactic at best: the ozone layer was only saved by the Montreal Protocol. I'm old enough to remember public service messages encouraging the population to refrain from using unnecessary spray bottles, and that would have helped about as much as Dutch bikers help against global warming.
And we certainly don’t want people driving 1000 miles instead of flying
If the electricity comes from coal or nuclear, no one would know the difference, except for the cleaner air
> And we certainly don’t want people driving 1000 miles instead of flying
Not necessarily true. A single person in a gasoline car, yes, flying is probably slightly less dirty. More than one person in the car? Driving wins.