Way back in 1968, an ecologist, Garret Hardin, wrote a now-famous essay for the journal Science called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The idea Hardin presents is relatively simple: Individuals that act independently and rationally according to their own economic self-interest can behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by taking advantage of common resources. The commons refer to resources which can be used by anyone, yet owned by no one, such as air and water. When users of the same common compete for the same resources, that leads to an unsustainable situation. And, that is a tragedy of the commons. In 1833, the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet called “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population,“ which included a hypothetical example of the over-use of a common resource. He uses cattle herders sharing a common parcel of land on which they were each entitled to let their cows graze. He theorized that if a herder put more than his allotted number of cattle on the common, overgrazing could result. And, for each additional animal, a herder could receive additional benefits, while the whole group shared the resulting damage to the commons. If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. Our shared atmosphere as the commons? Perhaps the biggest of the commons is the climate itself because it affects the entire planet and all that live on it. Humans, through the ever-expanding industrial revolution, are, in turn, effecting the climate by lacing the atmosphere with compounds that cause global warming. And the tragedy of this common is already happening. Global warming is a threat to our food supply, to extended droughts, to larger fires, to increased flooding, to the availability of potable water, and to the disastrous consequences of rising ocean levels, among many other problems On April 22, 2021, a report from Swiss Re (one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies) titled “The Economics of Climate Change,” says that the effects of global warming could shave 11 percent to 14 percent off global economic output by 2050, compared with growth levels without climate change. That amounts to as much as $23 trillion in reduced annual global economic output worldwide. Obviously, this gets the attention of the world’s governments as the politicians debate how to mitigate the effects of global warming and reduce the related costs. So far, they have been reluctant to invest very much. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “We could have saved the earth, but we were too damn cheap.” I agree past tense is apt as the horse has well and truly bolted. But "we could have saved the earth but we were too darned selfish" is perhaps more accurate? Or, were we too darn uneducated? Or, did we just lack the co-ordination? We all knew what we wanted, but we did not communicate with each other in a way that could possibly achieve anything. Thoughts?