The tragedy of the commons was a 1968 essay by Garret Hardin although the ideas it encapsulated go back millennia.
The tragedy unfolds on common land where all local farmers graze their cattle. The common is large and fertile enough to support one cow per farmer. But one farmer decides to graze two cows. All the cows are now slightly underfed but, because he has two, that self-centred farmer benefits overall. That is until the other farmers do the logical thing and also decide to graze two cattle each. The cows then all starve to death and everyone is worse off.
Those claiming the UK’s contributions to climate change are too small to matter, are playing the role of that selfish farmer. We can indeed drag our feet over reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as long as no one else does the same.
The solution to the tragedy is, of course, for all the farmers to agree they will only graze one cow each. The Paris Climate Agreement is a similar arrangement, made for similar reasons, where all countries agree to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
The UK is a proud signatory to that treaty but scaling back our emission reduction targets, as many are now suggesting, would mean we have to withdraw because the treaty has a “ratchet mechanism” that explicitly encourages increasingly ambitious targets whilst prohibiting any back sliding.
Sadly, the US has already withdrawn from the Paris accords. If other countries do too, the treaty will collapse and there will be nothing to prevent a climate tragedy of the commons.
What’s needed is a better, fairer, easier way for the UK to honour the international obligations it has committed to. CCL-UK believes that the policies we advocate will do that.
