Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study led by the University of Maine.
Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how this process of cultural adaptation to the environment might influence the goal of solving global environmental problems. What he found was counterintuitive.
They essentially say that (better) international cooperation is required, and must be functional at the required (global) scale… and the other paragraph essentially cautions that “some might find it easier to take from neighbours”, leading to war, which is a proven and terrible waste of nearly all resources.
I would note that while we don’t have a global society, we do have a global information space (enabling different actors to understand the same data and to see a mutual failure as the end of certain actions, even if their viewpoint differs) - and we do have global trade. Arrangements where an economy making a transiton off fossil fuels, for example, enacts carbon use limits locally and simultaneously taxes carbon-intensive imports across its borders, would remove the biggest dis-incentive to transitioning - that of getting things cheaper by polluting somewhere else.