There is a heck of a lot of this that goes on within the energy and environment community where I have been involved for a decade. Tragedy of the Commons basically means that individual responsibility is a complete dead-end to solve any kind of shared resource issue. We've known this formally within economics for 200 years. Government, law and enforcement is the only solution, whether we're talking a city park or the entire planet's atmosphere. You should know that any time you are getting shamed or guilted into doing something like recycling, reducing energy consumption, cutting up plastic soda rings, instead of there being a law, some monied interest put a lot of effort into shifting the perception of responsibility away from themselves and onto someone else.

I am a staunch environmentalist and I full out reject any effort to make any of this somehow my personal fault and that I should guiltily stop having children, stop traveling, stop eating, stop driving or anything else. We are either all in this together, collectively solving the problem through our collectively determined governments or we're not.

More and more I think we are not going to solve this in a way that doesn't involve a massive diminishing of planetary carrying capacity. Currently we are bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.