by Neil Auwarter
As Americans prepare for a second Donald Trump presidency, the fight against climate change faces a new threat. Trump has vowed to undo Biden’s key climate achievements, reverse the U.S. commitment to the Paris Agreement, and ramp up fossil fuel production. If he follows through, it will fall to state and local governments — and individuals — to take on a bigger share of the climate battle.
This article explores the central challenge of our time: How can we shift from acting in a narrow self interest to collective action to solve what one prominent economist called “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” — climate change?
The ‘tragedy of the commons’
The “tragedy of the commons” is a well-established concept in economics. It describes the tendency of individuals to exploit a shared resource to the point of depletion, even when it harms everyone. In 1833, British economist William Forster Lloyd applied this concept to the example of common grazing land. If cattle owners act in their own self-interest, they overgraze the land, ruining it for everyone. Even if some owners reduce their herds to preserve the land, others may take advantage by “free riding” and continuing to overgraze, making it difficult to prevent collapse.
In 1968, environmental biologist Garrett Hardin expanded Lloyd’s analysis and gave the concept a name: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He showed how the problem applied not just to grazing land, but to global challenges like overfishing the sea and pollution of water and air.
Hardin suggested that the “tragedy of the commons” could be avoided by reducing population, or by privatizing a resource and distributing it among individual owners, thus incentivizing individuals to use their portion sustainably. However, where these approaches were not possible, Harden concluded the only solution was management of the resource by a central authority — specifically, the federal government.
Applying Hardin’s ideas to the common resource of the earth’s atmosphere, we can rule out population reduction as a solution since the global population is increasing, not decreasing. Nor is privatization possible, as the atmosphere cannot be divided into parcels and allocated to individuals.
Harden’s third solution — regulation through a central authority — has been the approach adopted to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Paris Agreement is a global regulatory structure that each participating nation uses to reduce its own emissions. And this approach is working: Global GHG emissions appear to have peaked in 2023 and are now decreasing, according to the international Climate Analytics Institute.
Trump’s threat to gut federal climate efforts will undermine the regulation-by-a-central-authority solution
Donald Trump, backed by narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate, has promised to again withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, repeal climate-protecting portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, increase oil and gas drilling, end the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, and even revoke the Biden Administration’s restrictions on coal plant carbon emissions.
Trump’s agenda would grant industries and individuals more latitude to produce and burn fossil fuels, prioritizing their narrow self-interest at the expense of the broader public good. By one estimate, Trump’s climate policies could nearly halve the GHG reduction the U.S. was on track to achieve by 2030. His policies could turn the U.S. into a free rider on the backs of Paris Agreement nations, risking that other countries will follow suit and drop out of the pact, fueling a “burn, baby, burn” scenario.
Decentralizing the climate fight: state and local governments, and individuals, must pick up the ball Trump has promised to drop
Even as Garrett Hardin was penning The Tragedy of the Commons, a young American economist and political scientist, Elinor Ostrom, was conducting research that would eventually challenge Hardin’s broadly-accepted conclusion that only a central authority could preserve common resources. Ostrom conducted field studies on the successful localized management of common resources worldwide: by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, fishing fleets in Maine and Indonesia, and groundwater users in Los Angeles. She applied economic analysis to these cases to show that common resources could be sustainably managed through “polycentric” governance — meaning control coordinated by local governments and organizations, rather than by a central government. Ostrom’s work earned her a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 and has deeply undermined Hardin’s conclusion that only a central government can preserve a common resource. Referring to Ostrom’s use of real-world evidence to challenge previous economic dogma, one scholar cheekily coined “Ostrom’s Law”: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”
Today in the U.S., polycentric climate measures are already under way, with many state and local governments enacting regulations more ambitious than federal law. Of the coming expansion of these bottom-up climate actions, 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn, said, “This time around the resistance will be local.” Examples of regional action include the 11-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on the east coast, a $10 billion dollar climate resiliency bond measure enacted in California in 2024, and the Comprehensive Environmental & Climate and Action Plan enacted in Dallas, Texas in 2020. For more about local climate action, see the Climate Emergency Mobilization Team’s Toolbox and a related article.
Individuals are also small but collectively huge players in polycentric climate action. Americans are increasingly defying the classical economic assumption that consumers act only in their immediate self-interest. For example, many are paying a premium for electric vehicles and reducing consumption of beloved but GHG-intensive foods like beef. For more on beef, see this Local Action article.