numbers, not adjectives — D. J. C. MacKay
Climate Change Cooperation
March 26, 2026
In the long history of humankind, those who learned to
collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
— after Charles Darwin
The Themis Mechanism
Climate change is widely thought of as intractable. It isn’t. It is a collective action problem and we know how to solve those.
Decades of agreements have failed not because of lack of concern, but because of the structure of the problem. When the costs of acting fall on whoever acts while the benefits are shared by everyone, unilateral ambition achieves little. No amount of goodwill fixes that.
The fix is cooperation based on reciprocal commitments: I will if you will. Nations don’t need to sacrifice their own interests they need a framework in which self-interest and the collective good are aligned. This is not idealism. It is how trade agreements, alliances, and every functioning collective arrangement works. We simply haven’t applied it to our climate crisis.
The Themis Mechanism is a concrete proposal for exactly that. Simple in structure, grounded in self-interest, designed to make cooperation the rational choice for every nation on earth.
Themis Descriptions
The Themis Manifesto (1 page)
The argument in its shortest form. Start here if you are new to this.
Escaping the Trap: A Proposal for Policy Makers
The political case for Themis — why conditional commitments change the calculus for governments.
The Themis Mechanism: Full Technical Proposal
The full formal treatment: the mechanism, the democratic procedure for determining the carbon price, and the analysis of fairness and incentives. For those who want the full argument.