Private ownership and regulation are just different solutions to that same problem. So you can have a regulated amount of grazing (where in theory scientists decide what level the land can sustain), or you can privatize the land and force the grazer to absorb the loss in land value from his activities, thus internalizing the externality.
That out of the way, I don’t think the article is correct. History is replete with societies whose self-regulation mechanisms failed and resulted in environmental disaster.
There's a documentary about it.
I believe strongly in private property and think if you can use it to solve such a problem, you should. But not all problems can be solved that way. Regulation stopped the filling in of the Bay, which, if allowed to continue, would have been an enormous loss. It was certainly the only solution people could see at the time. And I can't envision an alternative that would work.
Other problems, like overfishing, can be solved with property. The right to harvest a particular population at a particular time (and that can be bought and sold) creates an incentive not to overfish.
But not all types of ownership make sense. A resource owned by many people, all competing to extract all they can before the other owners do is itself just like a tragedy of the commons. Water rights often work this way. Better for these folks to have shares in a corporation that owns the resource. Better for them and better for the long term use of the resource. Even public ownership would be better than a privately owned tragedy of the commons.
It doesn't work because we are essentially at the stage where nations take on the role of the individuals in the original example. Countries have much to gain by quickly exploiting the resources common to all countries before the others can. This leads to the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, just as national government has solved it for more local issues.
The problem with world government is that you would need sign on by literally everyone, permanently. As soon as you had a serious disagreement and tried to enforce it against a sufficiently powerful country without their consent, we would have at best the dissolution of the world government and at worst World War III. The American Civil War at world-scale is not a pretty picture.
The system we have now works much better than that. When someone is cheating, the countries that don't like it put sanctions on them until they stop. The sanctions aren't severe enough to fight a war over but they cost more than the cost of doing the right thing, which resolves things for all but the most obstinate countries.
The problem with climate change seems to be that countries lack the will to actually use those methods. If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions target, that would be the end of it. But apparently they don't have the stones to actually do it.
Which would be the beginning of world government. Agreed upon rules with clear consequences for breaking them. Right now there are consequences for doing what the major players do not like, but the rules are not written down beforehand.
No it wouldn't, because it isn't a government, it's a relationship between fully independent states.
If a federal judge orders an Alabama school superintendent to do something as a matter of federal law, that superintendent is either going to do that thing or be arrested by the feds, and nobody is going to stop them. That's what a government looks like.
If the EU tells the US to cut carbon emissions or face sanctions and Donald Trump tells them to piss off, nobody is going to arrest Donald Trump and anybody who tries to is going to be met with force. Europe can then impose the sanctions, and the US can either give in or suffer the ramifications as a country, but at no point is anyone who refuses to comply going to be held personally responsible by an external governing body.
Moreover, each government's tools against the others are roughly symmetrical. If the EU wants to put sanctions on the US they can, but the US can just respond in kind. That hurts both of them and they both know it, so (absent corruption) they won't do it unless it's something sufficiently important. Which means you don't get the insane policies like we have in the US where the feds start micromanaging everything just because they can get away with it.
The conditions by which nations voluntarily joined the League of Nations (what eventually became the U.N.), and were willing to ceded national sovereignty, was WWI and WWII. All deaths are measured in the millions: just the Axis military deaths was multiple millions, total causalities upwards of 80 million.
A world government will take two things, in my opinion: an event that demonstrates such betrayal by national governments, that makes them partly or entirely illegitimate by their very nature; the ensuing catastrophe is not so bad that organizing a world government is rendered impossible.
That is exactly the opposite of what the article argues.
I suppose if you just hear about the idea briefly during a single lecture of an intro econ course, it's easy to grasp the benefits of private ownership without recognizing the limitations. Specifically that some common resources are not susceptible to private ownership, such as those you list, but are still susceptible to the tragedy of the commons when left unregulated. Hence the widespread misreading of the hypothetical.
Generally, the simpler these models are, the better, because complicating matters generally creates opportunities for bizzare arbitrage. By contrast, the proposed CO2 cap and trade (in the US) has so many well-intentioned loopholes with credits and the like that it will almost certainly cause unintended consequences like where an Indian manufacturer created and then sequestered a high-greenhouse-potential gas, resulting in a net emissions of CO2 (as well as a pointless use of resources).
The article may say that, but it's objectively true that there are failure modes to this self-regulation. You can see it in the West Coast's response to homelessness. Which is to say, that they completely fail to regulate the public spaces because the elected government doesn't have the character to properly fund the proper services and engage in involuntary commitments of people with mental disorders into hospitals where they would get care.
It's also interesting that the article points out that in practice communities self-regulate to avoid the issue of over-using a shared resource. It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy. While social ties might work well enough in rural England in the 17th century to self-regulate sheep herding it doesn't seem to translate very well to our modern society where the "commons" is the great coral reef dying or coastlines getting submerged tens of thousands of kilometers away from me.