Well, the modeled "Tragedy of the Commons" claims that the more people have access to an area that all have equal access to, the more rapidly it will be degraded, since each person has a narrow interest in exploiting it to their maximum benefit at the fastest rate possible. But it turns out this idea of maximizing a resource shared by all is mostly what economists (and the politicians, corporations, and governments they advise) rather than how most people think or how they acted it history.
Thanks for raising this topic. In terms of mass-scale human behavior, I do see the entire global warming crisis as one grand "tragedy of the commons." Each individual person, town, and nation uses the atmosphere as a collective toilet for carbon waste. It's really in no individual entity's economic interest to put limits on using this carbon toilet (our air).
It has seemed to me that the only way to regulate this carbon waste stream is to put an international treaty in place. However, there are suggestions in your post that people could be motivated to reform their behavior by means other than government/treaty dictates. This intrigued me, so I looked into Ostrums work and found the following summary of what circumstances permit effective local, non-government regulation of behavior:
"Design Principles for CPR Institutions[edit source]
Ostrom identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management:[19]
-- Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
-- Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
-- Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
-- Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
-- A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
-- Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
-- Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
-- In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.
These principles have since been slightly modified and expanded to include a number of additional variables believed to affect the success of self-organized governance systems, including effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole."
Looking at the nature of the CO2 waste problem, and the organization of the people and entities involved, I can't really see much room for optimism in the CO2 crisis. Most of the "principles" don't apply to this resource and the entities over-utilizing it.
