This is a fine article, but why introduce Moloch Traps to refer to collective action problems? These are well studied in game theory, especially from the 1960s onwards, and often attributed to Garrett Hardin and then Elinor Ostrom (who took at different view to the causes and solutions). Of course there's a longer history.
Could we get more detail on the etymology of Moloch Traps? And how they differ, at all?
Otherwise I fear this is a layer of jargon. When Goggling the term I can only see Liv Boeree applying it, which isn't a great sign/
The essay gives it a slightly different connotation than just a collective action problem (more of a fight against an enemy instead of a pressure to defect on your neighbor), but I agree it’s much less widely known and harder to look up
Came here to say that everyone should read some Elinor Ostrom.. either "Governing the Commons" if you want the academic explanation... or "Ostrom's Rules for Radicals" as a primer, or even Prosocial by David Sloan Wilson who worked with and expanded on Ostrom's Core Principles to help cooperative groups address collective action problems.
I would also say that one shouldn’t use the term “zero sum” here. A zero sum interaction is one in which every action that anyone takes produces just as much gain for one person as loss for another. The important thing about these prisoners dilemmas or moloch traps is that the amount of loss that is produced for others is *greater* than the gain that is produced for the person doing it, which is why things would be better for all of us if we could get to cooperation than if we all defect, as our individual incentives point us towards.
There’s no solution to zero sum games, just competition. But with these Moloch traps/prisoners dilemmas, there *is* a better outcome, and we need all the mechanisms of governments or social norms or marketization or any of the million things Ostrom describes to get to the good solution. But the important thing is that there *is* a good solution, unlike in a true zero sum game, where it’s entirely a question of who gets to benefit, and there is no overall better answer.
Technically, I don’t think it makes sense to say a *game* is negative or positive sum. A game is zero sum if the sum of the changes in individual welfare produced by any change of individual action is zero. But in a game like this, changing from defect to cooperate produces a positive sum of changes in individual welfare, and changing from cooperate to defect produces a negative sum of changes in individual welfare. The difficulty is that the negative sum action is positive for the person who does it, and the positive sum action is negative for the person who does it, unless we impose additional structure.
That guy is basically a Intellectual Dark Web type and it's really cringy to treat him as a leading philosophical thinker. He is more useful and anthropological study of powerful right-wing tech personalities such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Collective Action Problem, Tragedy of the Commons, Negative Externality, we have words for all these concepts without referencing a Techno-Nietzschean diatribe.
If it’s a shitty idea, just say why you think it’s a shitty idea.
What can we do to create a social norm of trying focus on the ideas rather than the person saying them? It is more fun intellectually to talk about ideas rather than engage in this endless doom-loop about how everyone is awful.
I am not saying it's a shitty idea. I'm saying it's a pointlessly rebrand of an existing idea.
The social norm I am trying to create, is to connect contemporary issues to a wider intellectual and academic community, rather than insisting on the terminology of niche Internet circles.
The fact that such niche Internet circles are also socially toxic is worth pointing out in this case, because it means the obscurantist choice is especially hard to justify.
I've already explained twice now that SSC being toxic is not a critique of Meditations on Moloch, nor is it a substitute for argumentation in general.
The critique I've made is on branding. If you use a brand - in this case naming your idea after a blog post rather than use the established terminology - you are endorsing that content.
If I had a podcast segment called "Red Pill Hour" you might immediately thinking it was associated with the alt-right. And you could critique the branding "why would you call it that if you're just using it as a generic metaphor for transformation and aren't going to go in an alt-right direction with it?".
Now, I actually did make one substantive critique of Meditations on Moloch, as an aside, which is that I called it Techno-Nietzschean. I agree with the idea presented in Hannah Ritchie's blog post which is that competitive zero-sum games should cause us to look for technological solutions. But the SSC article goes further and says we need a megalomaniacal totalizing technological solution, inventing AI God (allowing one to simultaneously defeat all rivals and resist all natural pressures) to truly solve zero-sum problems. Does Hannah Ritchie or Liv Boree want to be on the hook for that sentiment, or do they just like the branding? I find neither answer justified.
I don’t think we have sufficient common ground epistemically for a productive conversation. Concepts like “brand” and whether someone is “on the hook” for an idea they have espoused are impediments to thinking clearly or well. It puts focus on all the noise around the idea instead of the idea itself.
The only questions are, ‘Is it a shitty idea?’ and ‘Why?’. Reasons such as “because someone I don’t like said it earlier” or “saying that makes me sound like people who are icky” are terrible. We should expect more of ourselves.
"It’s energy that countries want, not fossil fuels."
I'm gonna quibble with this and say it's not even energy that we want. It's hot showers and cold beer and comfort and mobility, as Amory Lovins famously said. So the substitute for fossil fuels needn't always be an energy source. It might be insulation or opening a window or better urban design.
I don't think Dan was saying no energy - just that if we sit back and put a few more creative thinking caps on - we might come up with something even better. There are too many examples of this to condense them all - but we'll go with insulation. What about purpose built passive-solar homes that are incredibly warm in winter and cool in summer and might only turn a heat pump on in the coldest of days? What about New Urbanism built on 10% of the land of suburbia, that lets the poor walk to work and maybe a metro stop later get out and walk the other end - instead of spending hours in the car each day? Less land bulldozed, more environment saved. Less loneliness, more community. Less highway-strip ugliness, more attention to local town square beauty standards and architecture - because all that matters when it's just a 5 minute walk away!
Nice piece Hannah. If I were to add an example, I would add the current US political environment. Americans are trapped in a two-party system that the majority agree they do not want to be a part of. The zero-sum battle of these two parties is increasingly destructive, with both parties sinking otherwise good policies for short term political gains.
It is one reason that I have written and advocated for less "zero sum" voting systems, such as RCV or proportional representation. I do not think this zero-sum struggle is ultimately optimal.
“The key is to get out of zero-sum games and scarcity mindsets.”
This is a social narrative of being human on the scale of the nation-state that we inherited from the 20th Century as the special pleading for the special interests of capital markets professionals in exercising monopoly control over money supplies to enterprise.
In the 21st Century we need to break these capital markets monopoly over money to evolve a new social narrative of stewardship of abundance through fiduciary finance.
What drives zero-sum thinking is emotions and instinct, i.e., our "fast-thinking" response. People respond a certain way because they are predisposed to not consider new information.
A good example is reading the comment sections in the NYT of your interview with Ezra Klein or the previous op-ed, by Alexis Soloski. Without even considering what you have to say, the most liked comments often reject your optimism and reasoning. They blame human nature, selfish tendencies, and overpopulation. They are predisposed to a scarcity mindset.
Another example is nuclear energy. Many people, even people who believe that global warming is real, will reject it out of hand due to an emotional response without considering the "facts" about its safety. They let emotions drive their risk assessment.
I think part of the solution will require people to become more aware of their thinking process and be more "Spock-like," i.e., deliberate and logical.
The best way out of the poorly named "Moloch traps" -- they are actually collective actions problems and do not involve eating babies -- is to avoid collective ownership whenever possible. Private ownership with the rights and responsibilities that go with it give owners an incentive to manage their resources judiciously. Government owned or controlled rainforest means people have an incentive to cut it down fast. If they owned it, their economic interests would favor maintaining the resource.
Applying this can be difficult in some cases -- the air, fish. However, as technology advances it becomes possible to track such things as the movement of fish and to establish property rights in them.
The term comes from Scott Alexander's essay Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ I don't think it's precisely synonymous with "collective action problem" - rather, it describes a particularly pernicious form of collective action problem. But it's an evocative term, at least once you've read the essay.
It would be helpful to read Elinor Ostrom’s work, particularly the introduction to her book Governing the Commons. She points out there that throughout the 20th century, Marxists had said that collective ownership with central management is the only solution to these problems, and neoliberal capitalists had said that privatization and individual ownership of stakes is the only solution to these problems. But her book is full of examples from various collective action problems around the world, where traditional societies had come up with solutions for many of these problems that relied on specific features of the problem but were more effective in practice than most neoliberal or Marxist solutions have been. (Not to say that those solutions *never* work, just that not every problem has the features that make one or another of these the best approach.)
Yes, indeed. I have a little familiarity with her work but her book is on my list to read and study. Sounds fascinating. I had thought to mention her but refrained since I don't yet know enough about her thinking.
Love the post but have to nitpick something. When describing Moloch Traps in the first part you compare it to a zero-sum game and say in competing for X both parties wind up worse off. That described negative-sum game though.
Zero-sum would be no net change in shared goods, a just a redistribution with a winner and loser.
I think this is more than just a nitpick! In zero sum games, there is no socially optimum outcome - or rather, every outcome is equally socially optimal, even though the players prefer different ones.
The important thing in the cases being described here is that some outcomes really are socially better than others, but because the things an individual can do to make their own outcome locally better make everyone else’s outcomes worse by a net larger amount, we tend to end up in the overall socially worse outcomes unless we find some mechanism of collective governance.
Yeah, which I understand to be negative-sum. Although, I guess the case could be made that what is being described is zero-sum between short term and long term. But the problem is, the long term ramifications can easily be worse than the short term gains...so still negative-sum except with one party *feeling* like it's zero-sum. lol, very pedantic.
I'm not sure if fish are conscious / have subjective experiences ( https://www.mattball.org/2023/06/consciousness-fish-and-uncertainty.html ) and I don't know if raising fish for slaughter creates more suffering than the alternative (e.g., eating factory-farmed chickens). But there does seem to be potential serious ethical issues with aquaculture that should be considered.
More commitment to low emissions energy is possible right now because cost effective alternatives to fossil fuels have been developed, because people apart from activists - scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs - have been taking the climate problem and the challenges seriously. Handing funding to support that development may have been more empty gesture politics and even give em enough rope than sincere - as political duck and dodge - but turns out being highly significant, even world changing in retrospect.
Who knew funding R&D could produce unexpected good results? Although clearly some smart people did think wind and solar and batteries (including for EV's) all had real potential.
I think investing in low emissions energy for the sake of low cost energy makes supporting it for emissions reductions about "strike while the iron is hot" kind of taking advantage - and appears possible to turbocharge with carbon pricing. It would be deeply dismaying to see such a window of opportunity squandered. Or, given Doubt, Deny, Delay politics, deliberately sabotaged for the sake of saving fossil fuels from global warming.
Cap and trade type policies generally appeal to me and feel underutilized. They seem like a good balance of optimizing the collective good with the decentralized allocations that would come out of a more market based system. In practice they aren’t always easy to implement, but feels like they would get more broad reaching support.
Cultural change in many ways is the ideal because it’s “free”, just make people prioritize the collective good over individual incentives. But it’s hard to actually make that happen—seemingly often a byproduct of the other solutions presented.
I agree Richard. Despite the US coming up with the idea (as a way to solve the problem of sulphur emissions from power plants) it has only introduced emissions trading schemes in California, a dozen north eastern states, and most recently Washington State. Clearly much more prevalent elsewhere in the world (Europe, the UK, China, etc.). Cap-and-trade schemes could be used to allocate water rights, manage other forms of air pollution, and other resources that are prone to the tragedy of the commons.
?? The first paragraph describes a negative sum game.
Externalities and too-short time references are very different problems. They happen to coincide in thinking about climate change.
Externalities explain why _individuals_ burn fossil fuels when in the aggregate they will suffer harm greater than the benefit of burning. They are very much attenuated for the country that adopts a tax on net CO2 emissions (+ import surcharge on high CO2 products) vis a vis one that does not and probably benefit vis a country that adopts a more costly policy for reducing net emissions.
One of the political advantages of taxation of net emissions of CO2 over other policies is that they distribute the adjustment costs widely rather than concentrating them creating greater resistance. Wider distribution of costs may not only seem more just, but is more efficient if the unit costs of adjustment rise with the amount.
?? The first paragraph describes a negative sum game.
Externalities and too-short time references are very different problems. They happen to coincide in thinking about climate change.
Externalities explain why _individuals_ burn fossil fuels when in the aggregate they will suffer harm greater than the benefit of burning. They are very much attenuated for the country that adopts a tax on net CO2 emissions (+ import surcharge on high CO2 products) vis a vis one that does not and probably benefit vis a country that adopts a more costly policy for reducing net emissions.
One of the political advantages of taxation of net emissions of CO2 over other policies is that they distribute the adjustment costs widely rather than concentrating them creating greater resistance.
I disagree with this post's over-simplified characterization of environmental challenges as Moloch Traps/collective action problems/Tragedy of the Commons. e.g. "We burn fossil fuels because it offers us huge immediate benefits (energy) but at the expense of a stable climate in the medium-term. It’s in no single country’s interest to stop doing so because they will miss out on the short-term energy gains and will still have to deal with climate change if other countries keep polluting."
Firstly, it completely ignores air pollution, which is immediate & local. A country that reduces fossil fuel burning will have a stronger economy & more well-off citizens purely from the air pollution reduction alone.
Secondly, renewables (notably solar PV & wind) and end use technologies (EVs, electrification, efficiency, etc.) are LOWER COST today & will keep being so. It is in countries (and households/ most businesses) immediate financial benefits to adopt these techs quickly, and decarb would occur as a by-product.
What is keeping us from faster adoption of these techs is not "tragedy of the commons". It is sclerotic market design & regulatory capture that favors the incumbent industries to the detriment of the common interest.
This post encapsulates an unfortunate political naivete of Hannah Ritchie's analysis. I admire Hannah's efforts to convince progressives that there are a lot of positive trends in the Sustainability world, and that real progress is possible and indeed already happening. However, too often her analysis is blind to political economy and the most important levers for change. This is really classic "blame the commons" stuff, versus "confront powerful individuals interests & their captured regulators" - While fixing collective action problems is of course very important, the latter dynamic is even more important in so many environmental issues (energy transition chief among them).
Not all fossil fuels cause air pollution, natural gas (methane CH4) when burned creates mostly CO2 and H20 with a small amount of CO. Coal burning does produce particulates, SO2 and some mercury and other heavy metals, which is bad. Look at any chart of countries energy use (or even fossil fuel use) versus GDP and see that only poor countries use little energy. Also, air pollution is not really local, much of China’s coal burning and particulates blow over into Korea and Japan. America is beating the world in GDP, clean air and fossil fuel use, but not EVs or solar energy, so there is some contradiction there.
Renewables are cheap only because they are being dumped on the world by China, and even if solar panels are cheap, without backup they need additional gas peaker plants which increases the cost of electricity, which is why California has the second highest (after isolated Hawaii) electricity price of any state. The US also has a record amount of wind capacity, but wind generated energy output has fallen this year, as wind is unsteady.
EVs obviously cost more even when subsidized (except in China, where the subsidies are more complete) which is why Tesla and other EV sales have largely slowed in the US.
I don’t know what an example of sclerotic market design is, but as for regulatory capture, right now this is being done by renewable energy and EV and semiconductor makers, not old industry.
Great article Hannah. The Tragedy of the Commons problem is similar to a Moloch Trap. One thing that Garrett Hardin talks about in his original paper is that the amount of players in the game matters. There's usually a number of players in a zero-sum or win-lose game that the environment can sustainably support. For example, wild animals can be hunted for food sustainably if the amount of humans hunting them is relatively small. But now hunting wild animals for food would be totally unsustainable, since instead of 100,000 people to feed, we have 8 billion.
It's interesting to explore the amount of players in a game that makes that game suddenly unsustainable. Then it's a matter of doing what you've outlined: "better substitutes, coordination, policy and social stigma." But even then, at what population or under what conditions do those strategies lead to further challenges? As we get closer to biophysical limits to growth, more coercive measures need to be implemented to solve environmental Moloch Traps - and those measures themselves can bring about problems of their own.
Hannah, Just a quick note to say “thank you” for another thoughtful, interesting post. Always enjoy your writing - refreshing clear writing amidst all the noise out there. Please keep it up!
P.S. Really enjoyed your recent book as well. Good stuff.
This is a fine article, but why introduce Moloch Traps to refer to collective action problems? These are well studied in game theory, especially from the 1960s onwards, and often attributed to Garrett Hardin and then Elinor Ostrom (who took at different view to the causes and solutions). Of course there's a longer history.
Could we get more detail on the etymology of Moloch Traps? And how they differ, at all?
Otherwise I fear this is a layer of jargon. When Goggling the term I can only see Liv Boeree applying it, which isn't a great sign/
Liv’s use of Moloch comes from this essay, which starts with the Ginsberg poem on Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The essay gives it a slightly different connotation than just a collective action problem (more of a fight against an enemy instead of a pressure to defect on your neighbor), but I agree it’s much less widely known and harder to look up
Came here to say that everyone should read some Elinor Ostrom.. either "Governing the Commons" if you want the academic explanation... or "Ostrom's Rules for Radicals" as a primer, or even Prosocial by David Sloan Wilson who worked with and expanded on Ostrom's Core Principles to help cooperative groups address collective action problems.
I agree. I had the thought that these examples are all prisoners’ dilemma-like problems in which the agents all choose to fink.
The nuclear weapon arms race is a standard prisoners’ dilemma example in a lot of econ textbooks.
I would also say that one shouldn’t use the term “zero sum” here. A zero sum interaction is one in which every action that anyone takes produces just as much gain for one person as loss for another. The important thing about these prisoners dilemmas or moloch traps is that the amount of loss that is produced for others is *greater* than the gain that is produced for the person doing it, which is why things would be better for all of us if we could get to cooperation than if we all defect, as our individual incentives point us towards.
There’s no solution to zero sum games, just competition. But with these Moloch traps/prisoners dilemmas, there *is* a better outcome, and we need all the mechanisms of governments or social norms or marketization or any of the million things Ostrom describes to get to the good solution. But the important thing is that there *is* a good solution, unlike in a true zero sum game, where it’s entirely a question of who gets to benefit, and there is no overall better answer.
AIUI a Moloch trap is a *negative*-sum game.
Technically, I don’t think it makes sense to say a *game* is negative or positive sum. A game is zero sum if the sum of the changes in individual welfare produced by any change of individual action is zero. But in a game like this, changing from defect to cooperate produces a positive sum of changes in individual welfare, and changing from cooperate to defect produces a negative sum of changes in individual welfare. The difficulty is that the negative sum action is positive for the person who does it, and the positive sum action is negative for the person who does it, unless we impose additional structure.
It is from Ginsberg but it became a term of art from a Slate Star Codex article:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
That guy is basically a Intellectual Dark Web type and it's really cringy to treat him as a leading philosophical thinker. He is more useful and anthropological study of powerful right-wing tech personalities such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Collective Action Problem, Tragedy of the Commons, Negative Externality, we have words for all these concepts without referencing a Techno-Nietzschean diatribe.
If it’s a shitty idea, just say why you think it’s a shitty idea.
What can we do to create a social norm of trying focus on the ideas rather than the person saying them? It is more fun intellectually to talk about ideas rather than engage in this endless doom-loop about how everyone is awful.
I am not saying it's a shitty idea. I'm saying it's a pointlessly rebrand of an existing idea.
The social norm I am trying to create, is to connect contemporary issues to a wider intellectual and academic community, rather than insisting on the terminology of niche Internet circles.
The fact that such niche Internet circles are also socially toxic is worth pointing out in this case, because it means the obscurantist choice is especially hard to justify.
Who cares what circle it came from, and whether that circle is toxic? Is it a good idea or a bad idea? Is it coherent or is it nonsense?
What if a really good idea originates in an unsavory place? Or is that not possible in your worldview?
I've already explained twice now that SSC being toxic is not a critique of Meditations on Moloch, nor is it a substitute for argumentation in general.
The critique I've made is on branding. If you use a brand - in this case naming your idea after a blog post rather than use the established terminology - you are endorsing that content.
If I had a podcast segment called "Red Pill Hour" you might immediately thinking it was associated with the alt-right. And you could critique the branding "why would you call it that if you're just using it as a generic metaphor for transformation and aren't going to go in an alt-right direction with it?".
Now, I actually did make one substantive critique of Meditations on Moloch, as an aside, which is that I called it Techno-Nietzschean. I agree with the idea presented in Hannah Ritchie's blog post which is that competitive zero-sum games should cause us to look for technological solutions. But the SSC article goes further and says we need a megalomaniacal totalizing technological solution, inventing AI God (allowing one to simultaneously defeat all rivals and resist all natural pressures) to truly solve zero-sum problems. Does Hannah Ritchie or Liv Boree want to be on the hook for that sentiment, or do they just like the branding? I find neither answer justified.
I don’t think we have sufficient common ground epistemically for a productive conversation. Concepts like “brand” and whether someone is “on the hook” for an idea they have espoused are impediments to thinking clearly or well. It puts focus on all the noise around the idea instead of the idea itself.
The only questions are, ‘Is it a shitty idea?’ and ‘Why?’. Reasons such as “because someone I don’t like said it earlier” or “saying that makes me sound like people who are icky” are terrible. We should expect more of ourselves.
"It’s energy that countries want, not fossil fuels."
I'm gonna quibble with this and say it's not even energy that we want. It's hot showers and cold beer and comfort and mobility, as Amory Lovins famously said. So the substitute for fossil fuels needn't always be an energy source. It might be insulation or opening a window or better urban design.
Countries want production, progress and commerce, not just chilling with a lukewarm beer in a cold insulated house. Without energy nothing survives.
I don't think Dan was saying no energy - just that if we sit back and put a few more creative thinking caps on - we might come up with something even better. There are too many examples of this to condense them all - but we'll go with insulation. What about purpose built passive-solar homes that are incredibly warm in winter and cool in summer and might only turn a heat pump on in the coldest of days? What about New Urbanism built on 10% of the land of suburbia, that lets the poor walk to work and maybe a metro stop later get out and walk the other end - instead of spending hours in the car each day? Less land bulldozed, more environment saved. Less loneliness, more community. Less highway-strip ugliness, more attention to local town square beauty standards and architecture - because all that matters when it's just a 5 minute walk away!
Nice piece Hannah. If I were to add an example, I would add the current US political environment. Americans are trapped in a two-party system that the majority agree they do not want to be a part of. The zero-sum battle of these two parties is increasingly destructive, with both parties sinking otherwise good policies for short term political gains.
It is one reason that I have written and advocated for less "zero sum" voting systems, such as RCV or proportional representation. I do not think this zero-sum struggle is ultimately optimal.
Thanks for the mention Hannah, and for this fantastic breakdown of the concept. Was a delight to interview you.
“The key is to get out of zero-sum games and scarcity mindsets.”
This is a social narrative of being human on the scale of the nation-state that we inherited from the 20th Century as the special pleading for the special interests of capital markets professionals in exercising monopoly control over money supplies to enterprise.
In the 21st Century we need to break these capital markets monopoly over money to evolve a new social narrative of stewardship of abundance through fiduciary finance.
"Zero-sum thinking will get us nowhere."
What drives zero-sum thinking is emotions and instinct, i.e., our "fast-thinking" response. People respond a certain way because they are predisposed to not consider new information.
A good example is reading the comment sections in the NYT of your interview with Ezra Klein or the previous op-ed, by Alexis Soloski. Without even considering what you have to say, the most liked comments often reject your optimism and reasoning. They blame human nature, selfish tendencies, and overpopulation. They are predisposed to a scarcity mindset.
Another example is nuclear energy. Many people, even people who believe that global warming is real, will reject it out of hand due to an emotional response without considering the "facts" about its safety. They let emotions drive their risk assessment.
I think part of the solution will require people to become more aware of their thinking process and be more "Spock-like," i.e., deliberate and logical.
The best way out of the poorly named "Moloch traps" -- they are actually collective actions problems and do not involve eating babies -- is to avoid collective ownership whenever possible. Private ownership with the rights and responsibilities that go with it give owners an incentive to manage their resources judiciously. Government owned or controlled rainforest means people have an incentive to cut it down fast. If they owned it, their economic interests would favor maintaining the resource.
Applying this can be difficult in some cases -- the air, fish. However, as technology advances it becomes possible to track such things as the movement of fish and to establish property rights in them.
The term comes from Scott Alexander's essay Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ I don't think it's precisely synonymous with "collective action problem" - rather, it describes a particularly pernicious form of collective action problem. But it's an evocative term, at least once you've read the essay.
It would be helpful to read Elinor Ostrom’s work, particularly the introduction to her book Governing the Commons. She points out there that throughout the 20th century, Marxists had said that collective ownership with central management is the only solution to these problems, and neoliberal capitalists had said that privatization and individual ownership of stakes is the only solution to these problems. But her book is full of examples from various collective action problems around the world, where traditional societies had come up with solutions for many of these problems that relied on specific features of the problem but were more effective in practice than most neoliberal or Marxist solutions have been. (Not to say that those solutions *never* work, just that not every problem has the features that make one or another of these the best approach.)
Yes, indeed. I have a little familiarity with her work but her book is on my list to read and study. Sounds fascinating. I had thought to mention her but refrained since I don't yet know enough about her thinking.
Love the post but have to nitpick something. When describing Moloch Traps in the first part you compare it to a zero-sum game and say in competing for X both parties wind up worse off. That described negative-sum game though.
Zero-sum would be no net change in shared goods, a just a redistribution with a winner and loser.
I think this is more than just a nitpick! In zero sum games, there is no socially optimum outcome - or rather, every outcome is equally socially optimal, even though the players prefer different ones.
The important thing in the cases being described here is that some outcomes really are socially better than others, but because the things an individual can do to make their own outcome locally better make everyone else’s outcomes worse by a net larger amount, we tend to end up in the overall socially worse outcomes unless we find some mechanism of collective governance.
Yeah, which I understand to be negative-sum. Although, I guess the case could be made that what is being described is zero-sum between short term and long term. But the problem is, the long term ramifications can easily be worse than the short term gains...so still negative-sum except with one party *feeling* like it's zero-sum. lol, very pedantic.
I'm not sure if fish are conscious / have subjective experiences ( https://www.mattball.org/2023/06/consciousness-fish-and-uncertainty.html ) and I don't know if raising fish for slaughter creates more suffering than the alternative (e.g., eating factory-farmed chickens). But there does seem to be potential serious ethical issues with aquaculture that should be considered.
More commitment to low emissions energy is possible right now because cost effective alternatives to fossil fuels have been developed, because people apart from activists - scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs - have been taking the climate problem and the challenges seriously. Handing funding to support that development may have been more empty gesture politics and even give em enough rope than sincere - as political duck and dodge - but turns out being highly significant, even world changing in retrospect.
Who knew funding R&D could produce unexpected good results? Although clearly some smart people did think wind and solar and batteries (including for EV's) all had real potential.
I think investing in low emissions energy for the sake of low cost energy makes supporting it for emissions reductions about "strike while the iron is hot" kind of taking advantage - and appears possible to turbocharge with carbon pricing. It would be deeply dismaying to see such a window of opportunity squandered. Or, given Doubt, Deny, Delay politics, deliberately sabotaged for the sake of saving fossil fuels from global warming.
Cap and trade type policies generally appeal to me and feel underutilized. They seem like a good balance of optimizing the collective good with the decentralized allocations that would come out of a more market based system. In practice they aren’t always easy to implement, but feels like they would get more broad reaching support.
Cultural change in many ways is the ideal because it’s “free”, just make people prioritize the collective good over individual incentives. But it’s hard to actually make that happen—seemingly often a byproduct of the other solutions presented.
I agree Richard. Despite the US coming up with the idea (as a way to solve the problem of sulphur emissions from power plants) it has only introduced emissions trading schemes in California, a dozen north eastern states, and most recently Washington State. Clearly much more prevalent elsewhere in the world (Europe, the UK, China, etc.). Cap-and-trade schemes could be used to allocate water rights, manage other forms of air pollution, and other resources that are prone to the tragedy of the commons.
?? The first paragraph describes a negative sum game.
Externalities and too-short time references are very different problems. They happen to coincide in thinking about climate change.
Externalities explain why _individuals_ burn fossil fuels when in the aggregate they will suffer harm greater than the benefit of burning. They are very much attenuated for the country that adopts a tax on net CO2 emissions (+ import surcharge on high CO2 products) vis a vis one that does not and probably benefit vis a country that adopts a more costly policy for reducing net emissions.
One of the political advantages of taxation of net emissions of CO2 over other policies is that they distribute the adjustment costs widely rather than concentrating them creating greater resistance. Wider distribution of costs may not only seem more just, but is more efficient if the unit costs of adjustment rise with the amount.
?? The first paragraph describes a negative sum game.
Externalities and too-short time references are very different problems. They happen to coincide in thinking about climate change.
Externalities explain why _individuals_ burn fossil fuels when in the aggregate they will suffer harm greater than the benefit of burning. They are very much attenuated for the country that adopts a tax on net CO2 emissions (+ import surcharge on high CO2 products) vis a vis one that does not and probably benefit vis a country that adopts a more costly policy for reducing net emissions.
One of the political advantages of taxation of net emissions of CO2 over other policies is that they distribute the adjustment costs widely rather than concentrating them creating greater resistance.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-28-and-counting
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-risk-and-insurance
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change 1
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change 2
I disagree with this post's over-simplified characterization of environmental challenges as Moloch Traps/collective action problems/Tragedy of the Commons. e.g. "We burn fossil fuels because it offers us huge immediate benefits (energy) but at the expense of a stable climate in the medium-term. It’s in no single country’s interest to stop doing so because they will miss out on the short-term energy gains and will still have to deal with climate change if other countries keep polluting."
Firstly, it completely ignores air pollution, which is immediate & local. A country that reduces fossil fuel burning will have a stronger economy & more well-off citizens purely from the air pollution reduction alone.
Secondly, renewables (notably solar PV & wind) and end use technologies (EVs, electrification, efficiency, etc.) are LOWER COST today & will keep being so. It is in countries (and households/ most businesses) immediate financial benefits to adopt these techs quickly, and decarb would occur as a by-product.
What is keeping us from faster adoption of these techs is not "tragedy of the commons". It is sclerotic market design & regulatory capture that favors the incumbent industries to the detriment of the common interest.
This post encapsulates an unfortunate political naivete of Hannah Ritchie's analysis. I admire Hannah's efforts to convince progressives that there are a lot of positive trends in the Sustainability world, and that real progress is possible and indeed already happening. However, too often her analysis is blind to political economy and the most important levers for change. This is really classic "blame the commons" stuff, versus "confront powerful individuals interests & their captured regulators" - While fixing collective action problems is of course very important, the latter dynamic is even more important in so many environmental issues (energy transition chief among them).
Not all fossil fuels cause air pollution, natural gas (methane CH4) when burned creates mostly CO2 and H20 with a small amount of CO. Coal burning does produce particulates, SO2 and some mercury and other heavy metals, which is bad. Look at any chart of countries energy use (or even fossil fuel use) versus GDP and see that only poor countries use little energy. Also, air pollution is not really local, much of China’s coal burning and particulates blow over into Korea and Japan. America is beating the world in GDP, clean air and fossil fuel use, but not EVs or solar energy, so there is some contradiction there.
Renewables are cheap only because they are being dumped on the world by China, and even if solar panels are cheap, without backup they need additional gas peaker plants which increases the cost of electricity, which is why California has the second highest (after isolated Hawaii) electricity price of any state. The US also has a record amount of wind capacity, but wind generated energy output has fallen this year, as wind is unsteady.
EVs obviously cost more even when subsidized (except in China, where the subsidies are more complete) which is why Tesla and other EV sales have largely slowed in the US.
I don’t know what an example of sclerotic market design is, but as for regulatory capture, right now this is being done by renewable energy and EV and semiconductor makers, not old industry.
I doubt you're a real person
We all must learn to deal with reality.
This comment is a nice example of zero-sum thinking. :)
Ha! Touche.
Enjoy the radical centre....
Great article Hannah. The Tragedy of the Commons problem is similar to a Moloch Trap. One thing that Garrett Hardin talks about in his original paper is that the amount of players in the game matters. There's usually a number of players in a zero-sum or win-lose game that the environment can sustainably support. For example, wild animals can be hunted for food sustainably if the amount of humans hunting them is relatively small. But now hunting wild animals for food would be totally unsustainable, since instead of 100,000 people to feed, we have 8 billion.
It's interesting to explore the amount of players in a game that makes that game suddenly unsustainable. Then it's a matter of doing what you've outlined: "better substitutes, coordination, policy and social stigma." But even then, at what population or under what conditions do those strategies lead to further challenges? As we get closer to biophysical limits to growth, more coercive measures need to be implemented to solve environmental Moloch Traps - and those measures themselves can bring about problems of their own.
Hannah, Just a quick note to say “thank you” for another thoughtful, interesting post. Always enjoy your writing - refreshing clear writing amidst all the noise out there. Please keep it up!
P.S. Really enjoyed your recent book as well. Good stuff.
Population growth requires education to stop the trap. But we cut our foreign aid???