Is it too late for “collective action”?

People may understand that they should act in a certain way for the greater good, but as individuals, they are loathe to turn off their air conditioning or stop flying places for vacations — knowing that others will not be joining them. This is why government is the most frequent solution to “collective action problems”.

The meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that a simple model of heat convection possesses intrinsic unpredictability, a circumstance he called the “butterfly effect,” suggesting that the mere flapping of a butterfly’s wing can change the weather.

An extreme weather event or climate disaster has occurred every day, on average, somewhere in the world over the last 50 years, marking a five-fold increase over that period, a new UN analysis shows. “People need to recognize that events that happened in the past are no longer a good predictor of the future and that we need to be much more prepared because we are in a different world,” said Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at the Yale School of the Environment.

. “We have more vulnerable people at risk, so we really need to develop a stronger culture of preparedness.”

Combating climate change requires collective action on many fronts, and it requires collective action both nationally and internationally. This is extremely difficult in democracies like the U.S., which face strong individualist traditions in the culture along with a lack of trust in government. Recent environmental disasters may have…