Climate Policy Is Failing: A Possible Achilles Heel in the Planetary Climate Rescue Race*
Robert A. Michaels, PhD, CEP bam@ramtrac.com
2 July 2024
I unhappily take issue with the thesis that “Climate policy is working” (Gallagher 2024) based upon its unrealistic assumption that nations’ net-zero carbon reduction commitments will materialize. For example, “... assuming full adherence to the commitments that governments made in Paris in 2015, countries should manage to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2.8 to 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century” (page 160). This caveat may be an Achilles heel hampering the race to planetary climate rescue. Warning against complacency, Gallagher aptly lists many needed public pressure strategies.
Unlisted, however, is an overarching strategy to overcome a persistent structural obstacle to winning the climate rescue race. Garrett Hardin’s (1968) ‘tragedy of the commons ’ initially was applied to the problem of Malthusian population growth. Hardin’s ‘commons’ metaphorically refers to the Federal lands on which American ranchers historically grazed their livestock. Ideally, herdsmen would limit grazing on public pasturelands (the commons) to leave behind enough grass to assure sustainability. Each herdsman, however, understood that his good citizenship would count for naught if a subsequent herdsman’s livestock grazed the remnant grass. In the absence of agreed and enforced regulation, rational ranchers would increase the size of their herds. This would logically result in private overuse and ruination of a public resource: the ‘tragedy of the commons’.
Hardin’s concept, violation of trust, or essentially cheating, remains a formidable structural obstacle to regulating private exploitation toward assuring sustainability of public resources, including Planet Earth. As Gallagher notes, “countries have the tools to address the threat of climate change; what is needed now is action” (page 166). Hardin’s tragedy, and Gallagher’s concern about possibly inadequate climate action, may be attributed to the same regulatory deficiency. Specifically, regulators often fail to prevent externalization of costs that are associated with degrading the commons, producing transference of such rightfully private costs to national publics, or of rightfully national costs to the global community of nations.
Global net-zero climate rescue may depend upon nations’ adherence to international regulations. Gallagher notes “improvement in policymaking and legislation on climate change at the national level” (page 162). Weakness of policymaking and legislation at the international level, however, reduces such self-declared national commitments to merely-hopeful voluntary implementation. As Gallagher exemplifies, national obligations actually have fallen short (for the U.S., by 19 percent; page 163). Effective international regulatory enforcement, beyond public pressure, therefore is needed urgently, without which the Tragedy of the Commons will become, if it has not already become, the Tragedy of Planet Earth.
Literature Cited
Gallagher, Kelly Sims. Climate policy is working. Foreign Affairs 103(3):153-66, May/June 2024; Hardin, Garrett. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162:1243-8, 13 December 1968.
Dr. Michaels is a consulting health risk scientist with RAM TRAC Corporation in Schenectady, New York, and author of “Civics and Science: Contemporary Issues for Civil Democracy.”
*Suggested citation:
Michaels, Robert A. Climate policy is failing: a possible Achilles heel in the planetary climate rescue race. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381917792_Climate_Policy_Is Failing A PossibleAchilles Heel_in_th e Planetary ClimateRescue_Race; Comment, | page, 2 July 2024.
Publication citation
Michaels, RA. Climate policy is failing: a possible Achilles heel in the planetary climate rescue race. ResearchGate,,https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381917792_Climate_Policy_Is_Failing_A_Possible_Achilles_Heel_in_the_Planetary_Climate_Rescue_Race, Comment, 1 page, 2 July 2024;