Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Improving Air Quality
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little thought needs to be paid to it. When something is not working, however, we need to understand enough about the system in order to fix it.
Technological solutions can often get us a substantial way towards a fix,
but it is almost never sufficient or stable over time. The reason technology
provides only a partial solution is because human behavior is always part of
the system. Even as energy production shifts to renewable resources, energy
storage improves and expands, and energy use gets more efficient – at the
end of the day, human decision making and behaviors will play a critical role
in the success or failure of these technological innovations.
Understanding how renewable resources work as common goods, and
in particular how people think and behave in such situations, is therefore
important for addressing how to keep such systems working and how to
fix them when challenged. You can think of it as similar to the situation of
any expert who deals with a complex system (e.g. a car mechanic working
on a car; a neurosurgeon working on a patient). There is the actual system
(car; brain) to be dealt with, lots of technology which can aid in the process,
and the expert who decides on approach and implementation. The expert’s
job is to fix the system when it has some kind of problem, which requires a
deep understanding of what a correctly functioning system should look like.
At the same time, that expert has to get the cooperation of other people (the
car’s owner; the patient) with regard to supportive and consistent behaviors
before, during, and after making any effective changes.
This chapter is about the dynamics of air quality as a common resource
system – a system that is influenced by human behaviors (e.g. carbon
emissions and other pollutants), that in turn influences humans (e.g. health
consequences and longer- term climate change impacts), and that can potentially be expanded or altered by technology. A central thesis of this paper
is that effectively maintaining, fixing, or even improving a system is possible only
once we have a thorough understanding of how that system works. This is not a
chapter of mathematical proofs, which can be the case in economic analyses
of common resources, but rather an exercise in logical analyses of what can
happen when resources are overtaxed. Briefly, our focus is on what tends
to happen as renewable common resources transition to other types of situations, such as public goods or club goods and even sometimes private goods.
Such transitions are not inevitable, but the infrastructure around a particular
resource must support the maintenance of a particular desired state in order
to keep it stably in that situation.
15.2 Common Resources Can Transition Into Other Forms
Air quality is a common resource (also called a common good or a common
pool resource) of a particular sort: It is a renewable common resource.
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little thought needs to be paid to it. When something is not working, however, we need to understand enough about the system in order to fix it.
Technological solutions can often get us a substantial way towards a fix,
but it is almost never sufficient or stable over time. The reason technology
provides only a partial solution is because human behavior is always part of
the system. Even as energy production shifts to renewable resources, energy
storage improves and expands, and energy use gets more efficient – at the
end of the day, human decision making and behaviors will play a critical role
in the success or failure of these technological innovations.
Understanding how renewable resources work as common goods, and
in particular how people think and behave in such situations, is therefore
important for addressing how to keep such systems working and how to
fix them when challenged. You can think of it as similar to the situation of
any expert who deals with a complex system (e.g. a car mechanic working
on a car; a neurosurgeon working on a patient). There is the actual system
(car; brain) to be dealt with, lots of technology which can aid in the process,
and the expert who decides on approach and implementation. The expert’s
job is to fix the system when it has some kind of problem, which requires a
deep understanding of what a correctly functioning system should look like.
At the same time, that expert has to get the cooperation of other people (the
car’s owner; the patient) with regard to supportive and consistent behaviors
before, during, and after making any effective changes.
This chapter is about the dynamics of air quality as a common resource
system – a system that is influenced by human behaviors (e.g. carbon
emissions and other pollutants), that in turn influences humans (e.g. health
consequences and longer- term climate change impacts), and that can potentially be expanded or altered by technology. A central thesis of this paper
is that effectively maintaining, fixing, or even improving a system is possible only
once we have a thorough understanding of how that system works. This is not a
chapter of mathematical proofs, which can be the case in economic analyses
of common resources, but rather an exercise in logical analyses of what can
happen when resources are overtaxed. Briefly, our focus is on what tends
to happen as renewable common resources transition to other types of situations, such as public goods or club goods and even sometimes private goods.
Such transitions are not inevitable, but the infrastructure around a particular
resource must support the maintenance of a particular desired state in order
to keep it stably in that situation.
15.2 Common Resources Can Transition Into Other Forms
Air quality is a common resource (also called a common good or a common
pool resource) of a particular sort: It is a renewable common resource.