We want to tackle air pollution because it affects our health; we want to tackle climate change so our cities don’t drown; we got our act together on ozone because we were worried about skin cancer. There is a selfishness to our drive to fix these things. By that, I mean at a species level – as humans. Collectively, there is a selfish reason to improve the environment around us. Our flourishing depends on it.
Again, too simplistic a view on the realities that global political economies actually allow us collectively to afford. Discounts much of the mechanisms that enabled the Montreal Protocol to succeed in abolishing CFCs (which were missing in subsequent agreements such as Kyoto) when attributing the success to the human "selfishness" to avoid skin cancer.
