The Earth‘s climate is changing, getting warmer, because of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The U.S. Department of Defense views climate change as a significant threat to national security as sea-level-rise, water scarcity, and extreme weather events could destabilize strategic regions and create more frequent humanitarian disasters. However, lowering the national security threat involves a global reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions. There are significant costs involved and achieving collective action has been difficult. The benefits of a stable environment are a public good enjoyed by all regardless of their contribution. Climate change represents the classic prisoner‘s dilemma where the dominant strategy is for all parties not to cooperate. Indeed, the Kyoto process has thus far failed to produce the level of cooperation necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change. The ongoing multilateral impasse calls for a fresh look at collective action problems similar to climate change to determine if other examples contain insights into the best way to approach the problem. This research supports that it is possible to define a class of collective action problems that parallel climate change and identifies three factors within this class—cost, social incentives and fairness—that may stimulate the development of useful climate change mitigation policies.