numbers, not adjectives — D. J. C. MacKay
Climate Change Cooperation
November 15, 2025
Understanding climate change is difficult if your
lifestyle depends on your not understanding it.
— adapted from Upton Sinclair, 1935
Digest
We’re creating a future that few of us want, the result of our poor collective response to climate change. In these pages I examine why our current approaches to climate change are unlikely to yield good results. I then discuss what properties better approaches would require to be successful. Practical solutions need to combine physical constraints with global political realities and notions of fairness while being operationally practical. These are tough requirements, but it is not clear that they are inherently intractable. I propose a simple cooperative framework, the Themis Climate Mechanism, which avoids weaknesses of our current systems, combines a strong ethical foundation with agreements advantageous to the vast majority and a specific route to implementation. Themis is designed to be able to coexist with other approaches, such as the Paris Agreement.
To avoid confusion, let me be more specific about the meaning I assign to two terms. The word “cooperation” is used with a specific technical meaning, not just a loose synonym for “working together”. Instead, it is used to refer specifically to sharing a common resource in situations where each individual’s selfish interest is different from that of the collective common good. This view of cooperation does not rely on altruism. Our concept of cooperation includes mechanisms for enforcement and strategies for dealing with free-riders. The word “fairness” is used specifically in relation to current and future greenhouse gas emissions. Since historical aspects and nation’s individual circumstances play large roles in determining living conditions, this notion of fairness is not the same as absolute fairness. But we cannot boil the ocean. To be succesful, we need to divide and concur. We need good solutions which can coexist with other mechanisms, to specific, contained problems, while acknowledging and continuing work on other issues.
The root cause of climate change is that our current economic systems treat environmental damange caused by greenhouse gas emissions as what economists call unpriced externalities. In other words, these consequences are ignored in the economic systems, leading to overexploitation and cimate change. To fix this fundamental problem, greenhouse gas emissions must be priced. However, I am not proposing national carbon tax, not a system of trading allowances, not a tax at all, but simply a price on the use of a valuable, limited resource, just like we pay for all the other resources we use. In this view, our shared atmosphere is a resource, and emitting greenhouse gases corresponds to using this resource.
The framework discussed here is technology or approach agnostic. A global framework will have to be, because different nations have vastly differing circumstances and different national priorities. The framework has no opinions whether national approaches rely on energy savings, solar and wind, nuclear, carbon capture or any other. The only requirement is that net greenhouse gas emissions are valued effectively.
Motivation
Current approaches to limit climate change are not working well. Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, CO2 being the the most important of the ones we can influence. And the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is growing faster now than 10 years ago, when the Paris Agreement was introduced. You might hope that the Paris Agreement simply needs more time to produce results, but unfortunately many of the problems causing ineffectiveness of the agreement are structural. Waiting for longer, or demanding more of the same, simply won’t help.
Renewable energy sources have been getting cheaper, and this may mean that market mechanisms might solve our climate problem. While some humility is always appropriate when predicting the future, there are good reasons to believe that market mechanisms on their own will not be sufficient to stop climate change. Some of these reasons are listed here. Some energy uses we don’t currently have effective means of decarbonising, such as air travel. The global energy demand is still rising, even if renewables are on the rise, this may not mean that fossil fuels are being phased out. Electrical energy price comparisons are often over simplified, not properly taking account of investments needed in storage and network strengthening, and that fossil fuel investments have already been made. But of course it is really great, that renewable energy prices have come down considerably. It’s just not rational to simply rely on market mechanisms, and not have a plan B. Cooperative mechanisms would work well together with market mechanisms and investment in renewables research and development. If it eventually turns out that market mechanisms on their own are sufficient for a close to complete phase out of greenhouse gas emitting technologies, then the cooperative mechanism won’t have significant consequences, and no harm will have been done.
Philosophical and political context
Why current approaches are failing
This page is under construction.