Tragedy of the commons

Right. It's like a bay full of lobsters. The fisherman have great incentive to catch as many as possible, so they catch, catch, catch. Soon, however, the resource may be depleted. There is great incentive for each fisherman to continue to catch all he can, but tremendous COMMON incentive to set limits. And so the TRAGEDY is that the COMMON cause is ignored and all the lobsters are gone.

Our atmosphere is a common resource. As a world population, we need to protect it. Yet each of us continues to drive, turn on lights, and burn ever more fossil fuels.

The solution is for all the fishermen to create laws that limit their daily catch. For global warming, the answer is far from obvious, given the current politics of denial, funded by Big Oil.

Tragedy of the commons is about over exploitation, which might be true with oil reserves, but not true with our atmosphere, we have actually have had good international agreements about the atmosphere, the many clean air acts and the Montreal accord over ozone depletion.
The commons was about population increases, and was not so much a tragedy, we still have lots of commons in the UK, which work well for the benefit of most people.