The Big Ask is on: These days, the leaders of the world convene in Copenhagen for the 15th time to address that “greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen“: Climate Change.

Will they ward off that Tragedy of the Commons of our time? We don’t know.

They are playing games in Copenhagen. Not of the entertaining kind, but of the intricately interdependent kind.

The Green Paradox is one of those intricacies: are we reckoning without our fossil-fuel supplying hosts? What are their stakes?

Let’s get the rules straight. Then let’s see what we can do to improve our collective odds for a cooler planet.

And while we’re at it, let’s level out this playing field.

We have long known that agreeing to avoid climate change can be an unhappy game: those who do not participate in the effort can still free-ride on its benefits, a cooler planet. And still, conventional ethics have it that everyone can make a difference. That is indeed the essence of traditional, unilateral green policies, from ecotax to EU-ETS and renewables: depressing or substituting carbon demand will make us better of, even if not everyone plays along.

The Green Paradox

Economist Hans-Werner Sinn warns us that this may not be so. If we ignore the supply side of fossil fuels, we’re just acting as inconsequential if naive fools.

Together with my colleagues Makaio Witte and Rasmus Relotius I recently presented Sinn’s argument in our public choice seminar, taught by Hans-Peter Grüner. Here’s the gist of it, and here’s the entire expose.