The Tragedy of the Commons

One of the most difficult aspects of life in the United States for me is traffic. It’s not so much the fact that other cars are occupying the roads that I want to use but the implications for my environment of having cities built around the automobile. First and foremost is the noise. As far as I am aware, there is nowhere out of doors in this city where one is protected from the distant (or nearby) rattle of an engine or the incessant whir of road noise. That means that I never truly can forget the other implications. Much of the particulate matter in the air that is responsible for all sorts of respiratory and neurological ailments is caused by automobiles (much of which comes from brake dust). This is worsened if you breathe deeply, such as when one is trying to optimize their health by exercising outside. Finally, I am rarely blessed with a significant length of time, even in my own backyard, when I cannot smell the exhaust of an internal combustion engine. It’s not exactly pleasant, but it’s also not really repulsive. It bothers me partly because it is a reminder that we, as a global society, have made absolutely no progress whatever towards our goals of mitigating climate change. Some countries have reduced their emissions, but globally, we’re still going the wrong way. The main thing that bothers me though is the fact that I am now suffering from an externality to which I have no recourse. I was not a party to the transaction that allowed my neighbor to pollute the air that I am trying to breathe, but I’m sure that the police would laugh me off the line if I tried to report him. Is this truly a free society if I cannot be free from the harmful actions of others? I’ll come back to that question.

The plume of exhaust from my neighbor’s sedan that has wafted across my backyard is not even a drop in an ocean of global emissions. It’s not even really an option for him to do anything else. I know he can’t afford a Tesla, and let’s face it: the Nissan Leaf is a glorified golf cart. Indeed, even the most ardent environmentalists still burn petrol to go to the store to buy clothes made from petrochemicals; they cook their food by burning methane, propane, or butane; and they rant against Big Oil on their MacBooks charged with coal-fired electricity. (I am only using the third-person there because I cannot fairly call myself an “ardent” environmentalist.)

Indeed, the excusability of my neighbor’s actions is exactly the problem. Just about everyone has a good excuse for polluting. We do what we can, and for many, that’s not much. It’s just the cost of living in modern society, and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if … well, if it weren’t such a big deal.

One of the things that doesn’t get talked about much is the issue of scale. I think that’s mostly because journalists control the conversation, and most journalists have the math proficiency of your average fourth-grader. It’s not easy to wrap your head around how much energy we need in order to provide a modern standard of living for 330 million Americans. Europeans tend to use less per person, but that’s mostly because they live closer together, and when you add up the 500 million of them, you can’t really get a sense for who uses more or if it even matters.

When you consider the idea of bringing the other six billion people in the world to a modern Western standard, the numbers just become so ethereal so as to lack any meaning. How much energy is 180,000 TWh? That’s about how much we all use, but I couldn’t put that in any sense that you could intuitively understand. How much is 430,000 TWh? That’s how much we would need if the average energy consumption were that of the environmentally friendly and geographically blessed Swedes (I mention the geography part because they have mountains and rivers where they can build hydroelectric dams, and they occupy a stable part of the Earth’s crust where it’s safe to store nuclear waste; most places do not).

Basically, if we want to bring everyone up to European standards of living (while convincing North Americans to use way less energy), we would need to provide about two-and-a-half times more energy than we do currently. If that’s the future we want, the goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewables is going to be twice as hard as the goal that has thus far been impossible. And that assumes a population of 7.5 billion. What about a world of 11 billion as the UN expects by 2100? On a global scale, energy transition and social justice are incompatible with current technology.

(and don’t hold your breath for fusion to save us; at best, we’ll know that it’s possible in the latter half of this decade)

This may be a situation that does not have a technological solution. That is why the top three actions for mitigating climate change are not technological but behavioral. Number two is education, which mostly includes family planning education and girls’ education. The worst thing you can do for your carbon footprint is to have a child. In highly developed countries that have embraced gender equality (at least to some degree) and individualistic values, the choice to have kids is really a choice. What about the billions of people who still live in extremely conservative countries where a woman’s job is to make babies? Some families want kids to help out on the farm, but I think this explanation is rather lazy. People aren’t great at looking toward the future, but I think most farmers will see the trap here: more kids means more mouths to feed for at least a dozen growing seasons before they can start bailing hay. 

We in the West have forgotten that nature does not intend for parents to outlive most of their children. People in developing countries have huge families 1) because there’s limited access to contraception (much thanks to the Catholic Church) and 2) because these people know the world in which about half of children don’t become adults (a statistic that doesn’t capture the variability across socioeconomic strata). In recent decades, child mortality rates have plummeted, but culture takes generations to change. That change has taken place in Euro-America and East Asia, but the rest of the world is still living in a pre-modern mindset. The global population growth rate peaked over half a century ago, but it remains significantly positive. The list of the top 100 countries by fertility rate (children per woman) is dominated primarily by Africa and then by South Asia. Each of those kids is going to grow up to use even more energy than their parents, and they (like us) will prefer dirty energy over no energy.

I will not argue that we should let these kids starve (I’ll lose the argument in favor of meaningless suffering every time), but one cannot suffer if they do not exist. It would be better for all of us (and according to the anti-natalists, for the kids themselves) if they had never been born. While demographers like Hans Rosling would tell you that simply developing these countries will encourage them to bring down their fertility rates voluntarily, that still means we’re on track for three to four billion more energy consumers before we hit a peak. We have definitely exceeded some of our planetary boundaries. In my personal opinion, we have already exceeded the total carrying capacity of Earth, and many people much smarter than I would agree. 

If we are to avoid this situation, we have only a few options. First, our engineers and dreamers can prove us rationalists wrong by inventing our way out it. There are indeed many places to improve our energy efficiency (you get automatic efficiency gains by shifting to renewables and electrifying machinery, and we could feed a third more people if we didn’t waste so much food). However, from what I have seen, every gain in efficiency has simply allowed us to use more energy in other ways. Instead of doing more with less, we simply find new ways to do more with even more.

The second option is to convince people to accept less: less driving, less powerful cars, cooler homes in winter, warmer homes in summer, shorter showers, fewer new products, etc. I won’t even argue this. If you’ve ever met a human (seriously, any one of them; the odds of your only having met an ascetic are negligible if you’re reading this), you’ll know that I shouldn’t have even wasted the time mentioning this option.

The last option is the one nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the whole reason I started this rant, but it’s something we all need to talk about. The same year that global population growth peaked (1968), Prof. Garrett Hardin of UCSB wrote “The Tragedy of the Commons: The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.”

Despite being over half a century since its writing, the essay is still relevant. Some of the details have changed, but his fundamental concern is even more important than ever. He writes, “I have made the unusual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem.” When we recognize that each one of us is an energy flux in an energy system that includes everything from our homes to the sun, we can see that this way of thinking incorporates all other problems such as food and water scarcity or lack of protection from the elements.

Hardin presents Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides economies toward maximum efficiency. It is an important observation of the capitalist economic organization that was just burgeoning in 1776, but it has its limitations (which were clear to Smith but apparently not to the people who worship him now). What Smith noticed at the core of the capitalist economy was the specialization of labor and private property. By specializing in one trade, a person can become much more efficient in that task, and the cooperation of many specialists can produce finished products. Private property provides the incentive for individuals to get the most out of one’s capital (which could be financial, physical, or human). The argument for specialization and privatization is obvious when one considers the classic example of the “tragedy of the commons” given by William Forster Lloyd in 1833.

Imagine a field of wild grasses where several farmers allow their cattle to graze. As long as the cows do not eat the grass faster than it can grow, there is no problem, and farmers can all enjoy the common space. However, once that capacity is reached, a tragic calculus takes over. If I am one of those farmers, and I add another cow to the pasture which is already at capacity, the pasture will start to degrade. Eventually, we will all lose out because we won’t have a pasture for our cattle, but in the short term, I still get the full profit from having raised an extra cow. In that way, we share the damage, but I alone reap the rewards. 

Even if all the farmers started this experiment as friends who want to cooperate, the calculus tends to win out, whether we are cognizant of it or not. How does one determine the carrying capacity of a field? I’m sure some agriculturist knows, but odds are that not all of the farmers do, and they have a strong incentive to overestimate. Indeed, the USDA publishes guidance on rotational grazing because so many pastures are overgrazed. The “hypothetical” pasture mentioned above isn’t hypothetical at all; it’s a daily reality.

Free-marketeers might say that the solution is obvious: privatization. Simply allow the farmers to buy shares of the pasture. That way, each farmer will reap the full reward and the full penalty for use/misuse of his share of the pasture. Of course, it’s not a perfectly stable situation. One farmer is likely to do better than the others over time, and he’ll use his extra profits to buy out the other farmers, and eventually, he’ll own the whole pasture. This may seem unfair, but free-marketeers will rejoice. The invisible hand has maximized efficiency! It has found who is ostensibly the “best” farmer and chosen him to be the specialist for cattle grazing. The others can now go specialize in something else like making fertilizer or agricultural machinery, thus causing the economy to grow. Voila! A rising tide that lifts all boats!

But what about the air that I wish to keep free of my neighbor’s exhaust? Can we just privatize it? Must I build a glass dome over my house to keep my air? Should we all isolate ourselves in geodesic domes? I sure hope not!

And what about health? I don’t mean healthcare; I mean our individual health. Why does the government have the right to tell me to close my business in the name of “public health”? The tragic calculus is exactly the same. The chances of my contracting CoViD-19 are slim to none, and the chances that I’ll get major symptoms are doubly small. However, if we shut down the economy, I’m as sure to lose money as I can be sure that a bear poops in the woods. It’s in my best interest to continue business as usual. Even with private property visited by private individuals functioning via private capital, there still exists a commons in which this commerce occurs. 

As soon as our population exceeds the carrying capacity of our environment, we necessarily enter a commons. American Indians to this day struggle with the concept of private property because before white settlers arrived, they didn’t have to deal with the challenges that come with a commons. They were mostly nomadic, moving to places of plenty while depleted resources were naturally replenished. When their numbers grew beyond the capacity of their environment, famine or war corrected them. The concept of property was tied to use: the area is yours as long as you’re using it. This works just fine if the next person who wants to use the area comes along after your waste has been decomposed, the fish have spawned, or another tree has grown. We do not live in that world, and we never will again.

This situation has come about because Homo sapiens has been, for lack of a better word, too “successful”. We have colonized every inch of livable surface on this planet, we’ve reached a limit for fishing our oceans, we continue to clear forests for more land to grow food, and we’re changing the climate and environments too quickly for many species to keep up. We are now in a global commons. 

Some people may revel in this feat of species dominance, but what benefit is there to each of us individually if there are 7.5 billion other creatures who happen to share almost all of our genetic code? Perhaps to the extent that we have made extraordinary technological advances that have given us the assurance to pursue a variety of paths toward fulfilling lives, a large and specialized society has been good. However, most of us are little more than parasites living on the great ideas of geniuses of the past.

In a sort of twisted way, we should have been listening to the free-marketeers (who would mostly be called “libertarians” these days) the whole time. If we had embraced laissez-faire capitalism to its maximum, we would not have an overpopulation problem. Hardin presents the evolutionary thought experiment of what would happen if there were no welfare state and parents alone were responsible for the welfare of their children. In that case, the most fecund parents would have so many children that they would be unable to feed them all and would end up being incentivized to limit their family size. He presents a study of the fecundity of birds as an example.

However, we only need to look at the way pre-industrial civilizations lived. In the whole of the Precolumbian Americas, there were probably about 100 million people, about 10% of today’s population. Contrast that with a world in which having another child will get you a larger welfare check. Granted, the people who have kids for this reason are a very small minority, but they do exist, and the point stands: most people nowadays have a perfectly reasonable expectation that every child they have will live a prosperous and comfortable life. Most probably think they’ll have the means to get them there, but if they’re wrong, the state will take over. The gains are privatized, and the losses are socialized.

Again, I won’t argue that we want to live in that world in which we have to let the starvation of children be the method of correction. There has to be a better way. Unfortunately, the only way to compel a smaller population within a generation that we have seen thus far is through government enforcement of a limit on childbearing. Very few of us would like to live under the totalitarian regime that enforces the two-child policy in China, but the effects of the policy are expected to be positive. The current fertility rate in China is not a good indicator of how many children women would prefer to have because of government restrictions, but other culturally similar countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore) all have fertility rates well below 2.0, so it is likely that most families will be their preferred size. However, those other countries got there through decades of industrialization. The planet does not have decades more to wait for Africa and South Asia. However, the method of getting there quickly is abhorrent to most people. It flies in the face of the idea of freedom.

I said I would return to the idea of freedom. We freedom-loving Americans have a very complicated relationship with the idea. It’s built into us, being the descendants mostly of those who fought for freedom from tyrannical monarchy or those who gave everything to seek freedom in a new and uncertain world. Yet, over the last century, we’ve welcomed the growth of government power to trade freedom for security. It’s worth reexamining what we actually mean by freedom.

Libertarians will tell you that freedom is the ability to do what you want as long as it doesn’t interfere with my ability to do what I want, but we immediately find irresolvable quandaries in which the chosen lifestyles of two people are mutually exclusive. Orwell said that freedom is simply the ability to state that two and two is four and that all other freedoms follow naturally. Our Bill of Rights protects our freedoms to practice our religion, to assemble, to print, and to speak. It also provides freedoms from government persecution of many forms, but it says very little about the freedom from the actions of other citizens. The laws of our country, our states, and our municipalities ought to protect us from harm from other citizens, but where do we draw the line? Is it only physical harm? Direct harm? Intentional harm? The fact that verbal assault, being an accessory to a crime, and involuntary manslaughter are all punishable offenses tells that the line is further along.

It appears to me that any act that interferes with a person’s realization of a reasonable way of living may be considered a punishable offense. Is it unreasonable to want to be able to breathe fresh air on my back patio? Is it unreasonable to expect that I will be able to find nourishing food at the grocery store? (We’re already far past expecting that we all could grow our own food.) Is it unreasonable to want to be able to farm the lands one’s family has farmed for generations that are now drying out because of extreme heat? Is it unreasonable to want to live near a coastline that is now getting pummelled by more extreme hurricanes? Is it unreasonable to want to make a career in a trade that is being flooded with climate refugees? Is it unreasonable for members of the community to have a say in the future size of that community?

In all of these examples, there is no one to blame. There is no one we can try in a court and fine or throw in jail to remedy the situation. That is the definition of a tragedy. It is a story that is headed toward an unhappy ending because of forces outside the control of the characters. Yet, in the tragedy of the commons, the case is not truly that nobody is to blame. In a sense, everyone is to blame. Everyone who uses resources (which is all of us because we all have to feed ourselves) shares the responsibility for the destruction of the commons.

In that sense, the forces pulling us toward our tragic ending are not completely out of our control. They are only partly in each of our control. Let’s go back to the farmers who share the common pasture. What if they decided to take ownership of the pasture through an employee-owned cooperative business? They accept that the cows will belong to the company, not individual farmers, and that the profits will be shared. Now the calculus has changed. No one farmer has an increased incentive for adding more cattle than the pasture can sustain. Indeed, the optimum situation for everyone is having the maximum carrying capacity of the pasture so that all the farmers take home the maximum amount of profit.

This, of course, is communism: collective ownership of the means of production. There are many ways this situation can go wrong, and they multiply as the community gets bigger, probably maxing out at about 150 people. We’ve yet to see this work out well on a large scale. However, in a small community, forces like loyalty, trust, and gossip can theoretically keep each person accountable. 

Of course, eight billion is a great deal more than 150, but we have organized those billions into a few more than 150 nation-states. The leaders of these nations do get to know each other personally. Each one has a litany of other priorities besides personal loyalties, but it does seem that the current structure binding these nations together, the United Nations (UN), might be the most reasonable place to start such cooperation.

However, the UN has already committed to the idea that “Men and women … have the right to marry and found a family.” This was expanded upon by the secretary-general when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was approved, U Thant: “It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must inevitably rest with the family itself”. This sentiment has only been strengthened, and the arm of the UN that is ostensibly in charge of figuring out how to deal with overpopulation has accepted Thant’s decree as its core value. The role of the UN appears to be one of well-intentioned tragedy.

In a globally interconnected world of seven-going-on-eleven billion humans, we live in a global commons. At what point are we going to accept that we as a global community are living beyond our means and give up on the idea that procreation without limit is a human right? I do not want to live in a world under global Chinese dominance where there are workplace supervisors to monitor women’s menstrual cycles, but if we don’t solve the population problem soon, that may be the best option.

I accept that I’ve made a compromise so that I can live in an affordable house in close proximity to commercial centers. In exchange, I live with traffic noise and the occasional whiff of my neighbor’s pollution. We share a commons, and each of us has the incentive to use that commons to our greatest benefit. Overall, we take pretty good care of this common space. Cars have to meet stringent emissions testing requirements, and if my neighbor decided to dump his waste in my yard, I actually would have legal recourse.

On a global scale, though, we have no means of limiting the energy demand of society. We’ve committed to the idea that we simply need to harness enough clean energy to fuel our society in whatever way each individual chooses without regard to the common planetary boundaries they live within. Unless ITER is a success, this process will take many decades. If the energy demand of our population continues to grow, it will take centuries. We can either find a way to use significantly less energy per capita (and accept the decrease in the standard of living that may come with it) or we can act like adults and start to have a real conversation about who gets a say in how many additional humans a couple can create.

 

If you’re curious, I encourage you to read Hardin’s paper. If you have the patience for it, check out his 1993 book Living Within Limits, and let me know what you find out.