“Another moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner call [climate change] “a perfect moral storm,” based on the juxtaposition of a number of aspects, each contributed heavily to its difficulty. One is that the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions does not hit mainly upon the individual emitter, but it is dispersed over the entire population of Earth. This means that an individual looking after his personal well-being has little incentive to contribute to the common good by cutting his emissions. Conditional on what everyone else does, then, no matter what their emission levels are, my own emissons make little difference, so if it is more convenient for me to take the car than to take the bus, that will be the best action from a prudential perspective (i.e., when optimizing what is best for me without regard to what is good for others). In other words, the problem is an instance of the social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons. To this spatial dispersion of causes (greenhouse gas emissions) and effects (climate change), we must also add the temporal aspect: our emissions today affect not only people living today, but also future generations. This makes the problem even more difficult due to the asymmetry that our actions influence the well-being of future generations whereas theirs do not affect us. A further contribution to the perfect storm is our lack of adequate theoretical and institutional tools to handle issues involving the far future, intergenerational justice, scientific uncertainty and our actions effects’ on nature.”
— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Our planet and its biosphere”, p. 34