The Failure of Climate Change Negotiations: Irrational Countries Exclude the Poor and the Future Generations

Despite decades of international negotiations, little progress has been made in reducing the level of the Green House Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. The understanding of the climate change problem in economic theory as an allocation failure of common resources is explained in "the tragedy of the commonsÉ by Hardin (1968). We start with a simple prisoners’ dilemma game (PD game) that represents the essence of Hardin’s "the tragedy of the commons". We argue that the PD game model is not adequate for explaining the failure of the climate negotiations. As an alternative explanation, we claim that countries’ irrational decision making, rather than misdirected incentives of rational countries in the PD game, is the main cause of the failure of climate negotiations. The irrationality of a government originates from ignoring the well-being of the poor and the future generations who are mostly excluded from the market activities, and hence receive the least economic benefit, contribute least to the climate problem, and yet are forced to pay most of the non-economic costs of climate change. The current paper tries to keep the resolution of the climate problem in the realm of economic discussion, while following Gardiner’s (2011) view that regards the issue of climate change as a moral problem of ignoring the wellbeing of the poor and the future generations. The immediate challenge of this approach is to measure the non-economic losses of the poor and the future generations due to climate change and to reflect them in climate change related decisions