-Caveat Lector- http://www.guerrillanews.com/environment/doc87.html
Who Owns The Sky? Peter Barnes,August 7, 2001 Working Assets co-founder Peter Barnes has always been a man ahead of the times. What started out as a successful socially-responsible investment fund, Working Assets is now a long distance, credit card, Internet services and broadcasting company that has raised over $25 million for progressive causes. In his new book, Barnes proposes an ingenious solution to the looming global climate crisis. The following is in excerpt from "Who Owns the Sky?" (Island Press, 2001): The Sky Is Filling! There's nothing more fundamental to us than the sky�our sky, our unique sky. We're sky animals. We live on land but in sky. We inhale from and exhale into it about 15,000 times a day. We fly in airplanes and communicate with cell phones. We are to air as fish are to water... Here's a short list of what the sky does for us: It shields us from asteroids, meteors and harmful ultraviolet rays. It maintains the earth's temperature within a range suitable to life. It continuously replenishes our supply of fresh water. It delivers oxygen to our lungs and machines. It cycles and recycles nearly all our nutrients. It absorbs our exhausts and moves them somewhere else. It carries radio signals and returns them to earth. Unfortunately, the sky's ability to keep doing these wonderful things for us isn't assured. Many of its services require a precise mix of gases in the air, and that mix is threatened by human activities� By the 1990s, governments had officially recognized that Chicken Little had it almost right. The sky isn't falling, but it is filling. It can safely absorb only so much ozone-eating chlorine, acid-brewing sulfur and heat-trapping carbon dioxide�and we're now reaching those limits. Putting it another way, it's not oil we're running out of, it's sky. Selling the Sky The idea of buying and selling the sky is indeed strange. Many even consider it sacrilegious. Yet, given the logic of capitalism, drawing a line and then selling a gradually declining amount of sky below that line is the best way to save it. By the foregoing, I don't mean to suggest that the sky has no value other than its exchange value. The sky, in my mind, is a gift of creation, an utterly indispensable partner in sustaining earthly life. If anything we know can be called sacred, the sky is such a thing. It has much more than exchange value. It has incalculable intrinsic value. The trouble is, markets have no appreciation for intrinsic value. They're blind and dumb and stunningly mindless; they do what they're programmed to do with ruthless aplomb. That wouldn't matter if we could run our lives without markets. But we can't. We need to communicate with markets because markets determine how resources are used. All our preachings and sermons will be for naught if we don't inscribe them on tablets markets can understand. The very incalculability of intrinsic value is what makes it necessary to create an artificial value markets can understand. This artificial value then becomes a proxy for the incalculable value. It's not the equivalent of the intrinsic value, nor an editorial comment on it. It's merely a proxy, a useful numerical substitute. And it's much better than the proxy markets currently use�namely, zero. Who owns�or should own�the sky? In the coming era of scarce sky, the answer will affect every American's pocketbook. The answer will determine to whom we and our children�and every generation of Americans thereafter�pay sky rent. It's nothing less than a trillion dollar question. Practically speaking, there are three possible beneficial owners of America's chunk of the sky: private corporations, the federal government, and citizens through a nationwide trust. Corporate ownership isn't as far-fetched as it might seem. U.S. history has been marked by numerous giveaways of common assets to private corporations, from the enormous land grants to railroads in the 19th century to the recent gift of spectrum to broadcasters. The standard argument used to justify such largesse is that, in exchange for common assets, the receiving corporations deliver a quid pro quo of public value: they build railroads, extract valuable minerals, or transmit sharper TV images. Whether past in-kind investments of this sort were good deals for the public is debatable. But there's no doubt a future gift of carbon storage capacity to private corporations would be a terrible investment. There's nothing we'd get in return. Such a gift would be a pure handout, like giving away offshore oil for free. Fortunately, there's another way to own the sky�a citizen's trust fund similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund. My proposal can be boiled down to this: what Alaska did with oil, the whole country should do with sky. Why is Alaskan-style citizen ownership of the sky preferable to corporate or government ownership? One reason is essentially religious. It rests on a belief that the sky is a gift from our common creator. It wasn't given to a government, and certainly not to private corporations. We, the meek, are its inheritors. If it turns out this gift is worth real money, well, that money belongs to us and our heirs. A second reason has to do with values and priorities. Federal ownership of the sky would strengthen the apparatus of the state; citizen ownership would strengthen families and children. If we truly believe that families and children are the bedrock of our society, we should design our institutions and allocate our resources accordingly. A third reason is that the sky is nothing if not the ultimate commons�we all inhale from it, exhale into it, and use it daily in many other ways. On the theory that use implies ownership, or simply that commoners own the commons, the sky should be our common property. How A Sky Trust Would Work The Sky Trust is a cap-and-trade system in which the initial emission rights are given to a trust, which sells them to polluters and distributes the revenue to all citizens equally. You can look at the Sky Trust as both a civic institution and a mechanism for recycling scarcity rent. As a civic institution, it would embody our common ownership of a shared inheritance. Its trustees would have three legal responsibilities: (1) to issue carbon permits up to a limit established by Congress; (2) to receive market prices for those permits; and (3) to distribute the income equally. In the event of a conflict between these responsibilities, preservation of the sky would take precedence. The other way to view the Sky Trust is as a scarcity rent recycling machine. We, the users, pay scarcity rent for the sky because�well, because it's scarce. We, the owners, then get back our share of the scarcity rent because�well, because we're the owners. In terms of money in and money out, the whole thing's a wash. But for you, me and millions of other individual citizens, the recycling of scarcity rent can make a big difference. Think of it this way. If carbon emissions are limited, the effect is the same as limiting the supply of fossil fuels. That's what OPEC did in the 1970s, and you know what happened. Without a Sky Trust, the higher prices from limiting carbon emissions would be a windfall for oil companies and their shareholders. With a Sky Trust, we'd return the scarcity rent to its rightful owners�ourselves. Also remember this: though everyone will receive an equal share of scarcity rent from the Sky Trust, not everyone will pay the same amount. Those who burn more carbon will pay more than those who burn less. If you drive a sports utility vehicle, you'll use more sky than if you ride a bus; hence you'll pay more scarcity rent. Since your dividend is the same no matter what, you'll come out ahead if you conserve and lose money if you don't. In other words, money will flow from over-users of the sky to under-users. Economizers will be rewarded, squanderers will pay. This isn't only fair; it's precisely the right incentive to reduce pollution. http://www.skybook.org/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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