My research project is focused on the ethics of climate change, the reading brought me back to a lot of the core ethical problems of my topic. Simply, the idea of free riders is one of the core factors fueling the climate crisis, countries taking advantage of global resources and producing dangerous emissions without taking the steps to properly mitigate! And now we are in a place where countries are free-riding, waiting for another country to create that big carbon tax/ reevaluate the speed of resource usage to reduce emissions. The author writes “threats are useless, though, without credibility,“ today, the threat of the earth becoming inhospitable, oceans rising in temperature and acidity, smog becoming inescapable, etc, are all credible threats according to SCIENCE and the current global environmental state. Will it only be credible when it is too late? When people in the US are experiencing the natural disasters, warming, and smog for themselves? The biggest complicating factor that fuels the free-riding problem is that the emitters don’t see/feel the direct impacts. Like the author says when talking about solutions and change, “coordination is always available to us so long as we can communicate.” The key changing factor here is global communication and effort to make a change, because the countries feeling the impact, are not the countries that are producing the emissions causing the most harm.

The climate crisis solution will require what the author names “opting out” it is even stated that the path of opting out will not provide overwhelming cooperation ( it is impossible that this will be a truly global and cooperative force), but it might help to “avoid the fate of mutual defection in human collective enterprises (by reducing the dominance of there defection strategy).” Which is exactly what we need.