Shocker: People aren't always rational.
Shocker: Initial conditions do not stay constant.
Shocker: People's priorities wildly vacillate even on short and medium scales.
Shocker: The economic ideal of the perfectly informed and rational consumer is a complete fantasy and violates multiple physical, computational, and biological theories.
This applies to both the article and the parent's comment.
It explains why people pollute pretty well.
Oversimplified models fall down in the real world. Game theory is useful within a domain.
http://theconversation.com/game-theory-and-the-environment-y...
You'll find Game Theory a lot easier to understand if you mentally replace every instance of "Math" with "AI". (So instead of saying "The Nash Equilibirum is...", just say "I trained an RNN and this is how it would play"). That's really all it is. Usually the games are designed in a simple way because the "AI" that is being run is nothing more complicated than min-cut/max-flow.
"Pollution" specifically is a case of the "Free-Rider Problem", and there are plenty of game theoretic results that explain it.
If the game doesn't properly account for some incentive, it's the problem of the model designer, just like it would be the problem of the RNN designer not gathering the right type of training data.