Climate change and the Prisoner

We did a lot of driving over the Christmas break. At one point during that driving I was pondering our chances, as a civilisation, of surviving the looming climate change. It occured to me that dealing with climate change is fundamentally a trust problem.

Noone seriously denies that we have the technology to run our economy with less carbon output. The only serious (evidence based) debate is how much it's likely to cost, and whether or not costs are likely to outweigh the opportunities (the kinds of business opportunities which arrise in times of change).

So if we have the technology, why not make the effort to make the changes necessary to minimise the harm of climate change?

Trust.

We will all have to expend significant effort to overcome this problem, both as individuals and as countries... and very few people or countries will make that effort if they don't trust the majority of other countries to make a similar effort.

None of this is original, or particularly interesting. However, has it occured to you before that this is analogous to the Prisoner's Dilema?

The Prisoner's Dilema is one of the fundamental problems of applied mathematics known as Game Theory. In a nutshell: two suspects are arrested, the police don't have enough evidence to secure a conviction on either except for a minor offence (6 months sentence each). However, the suspects are seperated, and told that if they squeal on their partner they'll get off free, while thier partner will get 10 years in the slammer. If they both squeal, they both get 5 years in the slammer.

Obviously, if the Prisoners work together they'll get the most mutually beneficial outcome... but can they trust eachother?

I hope you'll see the parallells. But is this insight useful? I don't know. But I do know is taht game theory already examined this kind of trust problem exhaustively. Maybe we could we learn something essential to solving the trust problem of dealing with climate change from game theory.