Climate change is arguably the largest collective action problem the world has ever faced (Barrett 257). It would be inevitable to completely reduce all CO2 emissions because both developed and developing countries develop economically at different rates. Policy makers, just like the general population, have different spectrums of views on reducing CO2 emissions. Some people may actually want to reduce CO2 emissions, while others may think that keeping CO2 emissions at the same level or increasing the amount will actually benefit the economy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThis is to say that the benefits of economic development outweigh measures to save the environment. Whatever the case may be, people who have common interests will come together and defend whatever their opinion is on various issues. It is true that to address problems or implement policies, having just one person solve these big problems would be extremely difficult. Sometimes, issues such as reducing CO2 emissions require government intervention because it is usually the private sector that causes this negative externality in the first place. This is why many individuals who share a common goal and interest can form interest groups and participate in lobbying activities. Interest groups exist to influence the policies that politicians adopt when they are elected. These groups can vary in size in terms of membership. The growing problem that politicians who want to reduce CO2 emissions raise is that the ability of interest groups or lobbyists to push for CO2 emissions may gradually become more difficult to organize, especially as these groups become much larger in size. , which raises the problem of collective action. On top of this, politicians also face the problem of competing with other politicians and interest groups who have different views, for example they do not want to reduce CO2 emission levels or keep them relatively unchanged. Deriving a simpler version of a collective action The situation would be a prisoner's dilemma involving two agents. In this example, we can use two small groups or two individuals. It is rational for people and groups to work towards maximizing their return on reducing CO2 emissions. There may be situations where if everyone decides to coordinate and tackle the problem, each individual person could potentially benefit more than if they both worked in their own best interests. There may also be times when both parties are working for their own self-interest and one may be worse off and the other is better off. It is not true that people are all inherently selfish and work in their own self-interest, because in real-life situations there may simply not be enough information for an individual to know whether, if they could coordinate, they would be able to achieve more . if they were to work in their own interest, hence the lack of transparency. Collective action is similar to the prisoner's dilemma but on a much larger scale. Since multiple countries make decisions at the same time, the theory shows that the probability of any single person making the same decision to improve is highly unlikely. Furthermore, with so many people having their own personal opinion, it would be extremely difficult for everyone to coordinate to even achieve a common interest. Olson's thesis is, first, that groupsthey are difficult to create and maintain and, second, that smaller groups appear less afflicted by these difficulties than larger groups (Shepsle & Bonchek 241). Although the prisoner's dilemma provides a basic theoretical model, it has its limitations in explaining the underlying reasons and intuition behind why people or groups make their decisions. It would seem that with a larger group of people, there is greater aggregate support in tackling the problem and achieving the common goal. It is a logical assumption that a smaller group of politicians coming together is more likely to agree on a standard to follow. Small groups are more cohesive in the sense that their members are more exposed to personal communication and interpersonal persuasion. This contributes to greater transparency among its members and makes it more obvious who the slackers within the group would be. The irony is that larger groups may appear to have more power and say in policy implementation, but a larger group may lack transparency and fail to maintain coherence and uniformity toward the common goal. The larger a group is, the more it will fail to provide an optimal supply of any collective good, and the less likely it will act to obtain even a minimal amount of that good. In short, the larger the group, the less likely it is to further its common interests (Chamberland 707). To some extent, larger groups have more difficulty satisfying common interests. Larger groups also tend to be more likely to face organizational costs, enforcement issues as well as a lack of rigorous social control. Olson states that unless the number of individuals is quite small, rational and selfish individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests (Olstrom 5). This is evident to understand why even smaller groups can have fewer staff in terms of numbers but also have a better ability to be more organized and efficient. Furthermore, smaller groups are more successful in forming and promoting their own agenda. Before a politician has the ability to pursue his goals of reducing CO2 emissions he must be worthy of obtaining public support and favoring interest groups. . Through further analysis of several theoretical and real-life situations, Olson's theory of collective action will reveal that individuals will not contribute to a collective incentive if the additional benefits they gain from receiving that good were less than the cost of their contribution. Even if the contributions of individual policy makers contribute to the aggregate goal, there may be the possibility that numerous people within the group will not adhere to the standard, thus making the individuals who made the contribution in the first place more irrelevant in solving the problem ( Olstrom 5 ). Voluntary compliance with the behavioral sanctions of a public good provision is more likely in small communities than in large ones, reliance on voluntary compliance in large communities or groups leads to free riding and poor or non-temporary provision of the public good ( Muller 13). For the individual member of the typical large organization, his efforts will not have a noticeable effect on the situation of his organization, and he will be able to enjoy any improvements made by others regardless of whether or not he has worked in support of his organization (Olson 16).A Sometimes collaboration between individuals should not be based exclusively on focusing on the group's overall collective goals. As mentioned above, people have very different opinions on which one shouldbe the ideal policy. As the numbers in a group increase, you will begin to see more deviations from the overall collective group goal. Policy makers within these groups look for things separate from the group's core mission that can be hidden from non-contributors. These so-called selective incentives, also known as Olson's byproduct argument, essentially consist of adding benefits or pork on top of the common goal to not only prevent individuals from free riding, but also incentivize them to stay in the group altogether . Some of these benefits may include and are not limited to material benefits, informational benefits, solidarity benefits and intentional benefits. Policy makers must rely on some of these interest groups to design these corrective mechanisms in an orderly manner to stay afloat, especially in the long term. And just as a state cannot support itself solely by voluntary contributions, or by selling its basic services on the market, so other large organizations cannot support themselves without providing some sanction, or some attraction distinct from the public good itself, that leads individuals to for help shoulder the burdens of maintaining the organization (Olson 16). By providing more of these co-benefits, the interest group will still have the ability to remain united under a common goal. In this way, this would give the politician a greater incentive to push forward his CO2 emission reduction agenda with greater support from more organized interest groups. Since larger groups may have more difficulty maintaining their common goals, a real-life example would be the formation of international environmental agreements (IEA). Some common examples of IEA are the Montreal Protocol, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement (Meng 1). Remembering that CO2 emissions are known to be a global public bad, a common problem is that many IEAs are difficult to implement because public goods/bads cannot be excluded and this would imply incentives for countries to resort to freeriding. By using countries as representatives of individuals and IEAs as representatives of interest groups, countries can choose not to join an IEA, not to comply with the IEA with which they are associated, and to join a less stringent IEA. According to the World Bank, there are over 193 countries in the world and there is no real international government to enforce these agreements (World Bank 1). Under the rules of Olson's theory, it would be extremely difficult for all these countries to work together and push politicians to reduce CO2 emissions entirely. Although some countries have evidently high CO2 levels and have policy makers who decide to adapt to reduce their emissions, some policy makers in other countries do not need to consider reducing emissions. Furthermore, there may be countries that already know that some countries are taking measures to reduce CO2 emissions and free riding and would still benefit from cleaner air if they did nothing in the first place! Politicians keen to reduce CO2 may face a difficult situation. opposition problem where politicians are indifferent or encourage more CO2 emissions into the environment. Some of the reasons for this are that these politicians and interest groups may believe that the environment does not appear to be changing much or believe that economic growth would outpace the reduction of CO2 emissions into the environment. According to Olson's theory, politicians would also encounter the issues of smaller interest groups thanopposing party who tend to be more organized. On the one hand, larger groups that favor policymakers in reducing CO2 emissions tend to be more difficult to organize, thus delaying or preventing the passage of legislation for their policies. On the other hand, smaller groups would have a better chance of getting their policies passed. A real-world example would be large gas companies, such as Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell. These companies may appear larger than their size, but in numerical terms they are much smaller than the largest interest groups advocating for an increase in CO2 emissions released into the environment. The harsh reality that a politician who wants to reduce CO2 emissions these gas companies have a lot of power in the government where they can get their way to meet their policies. CO2 emissions are certainly a concern for damage to the environment, but many of these gas companies would prefer to profit more from natural gas and economic gain. Since they have such an economic advantage, they essentially have the ability to bribe or pay off politicians to get what they want passed. The researchers acknowledge that they were hampered by a lack of transparency regarding corporate donations and lobbying activities, which made it difficult to determine exactly how companies were trying to exert political influence (Guardian 1). Furthermore, it would appear that money has disproportionate influence and industries like these gas companies that generate a lot of money could have an added advantage and increase disproportionate influence when it comes to legislation and policy making. Politicians lobbying for these companies is certainly an alarming issue because this only makes it harder for politicians who really want to reduce CO2 emissions to be masked by further increases in power and influence. Because these gas companies are also smaller in size, they are much more organized, and there are fewer discrepancies between different points of view on what policies they want passed. Gas companies are just one example of more environmentally efficient collection actions. Even viewing from an economic perspective, producers, like these gas companies, are more successful at forming interest groups than consumers or individuals themselves. Interest groups can vary in shape and size and, if they at least have the ability to come together, they can influence politicians on what legislation should be passed. It may be true that in democracies the freedom to have interest groups can organize themselves freely. But another issue that politicians who want to reduce CO2 emissions need to be aware of is that nowadays there are smaller interest groups such as gas companies that can be so powerful that their voices can to displace everyone else on the playing field. Although Olson's theory states that smaller groups are more effective at organizing and remaining in a coalition, these smaller groups not only have more money, are more educated, have access to more information, and are able to spread their influence in a more nuanced way. Policy makers must address these implications beyond simple human behavior problems that would arise in a collective action situation in an interest group. Although collective action may seem like an inherent general issue among larger groups, Richard Wagner has commented that groups can still do particularly well despite its size. He commented that Olson's theory was too pessimistic and had little to say about it.