This paper shows that the failure of coordination over emissions of transboundary pollutants mayprevent the international community from reaping any benefit from the creation and adoption of acleaner technology and may even result in exacerbating the tragedy of the commons.The decrease of the emissions per output ratio has two components, the direct effect which is adecrease of emissions if the quantity produced by each player remains unchanged, and the indirecteffect since quantity produced changes and so do the emissions. Emissions may increase following theadoption of a cleaner technology, and the resulting increase in pollution damages can be substantialenough to annihilate the positive impact of the direct effect on welfare. We have shown that this mayarise for a wide range of ‘realistic’ values of the parameters of the model. Moreover, the possibilitythat emissions per output ratio and world emissions can evolve in opposite directions is supportedby recent anecdotal evidence within the context of climate change. While the world’s emissions peroutput ratio decreased from 0.54 (kilograms of CO2per 1$ of GDP (PPP)) in 1990, to 0.50 in 2000and 0.47 in 2007, world’s emissions of CO2increased from 21,899 millions of metric tons in 1990to 24,043 in 2000 and 29,595 in 2007 (see The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 (UnitedNations