The Sky's the Limit

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Under the Common Assets Project plan:

o Each U.S. citizen, current and future, would be a beneficiary of the trust, and dividends would be a nontransferable property right.

o Each year's dividend would be determined by dividing the revenue from auctioning emission permits by the number of beneficiaries.

o Dividends would be paid annually. Children's dividends would be placed in tax-deferred savings accounts.

The dedicated funds over 15 years would generate $450 billion, while revenue from atmospheric scarcity rent could exceed $1 trillion over the same period.

The biggest obstacle to the Sky Trust plan, of course, is political--the "pervasive influence of the energy companies" and an administration all too willing to give away the farm. The Clinton administration, Barnes writes, is "slouching toward a domestic tradable permit system in which carbon emission rights are grandfathered to large energy companies" such as Exxon and Con Edison. "These corporations, without paying a cent, would become the new landlords of the sky."

Barnes' critics include Mark Sagoff, who writes in the University of Maryland's Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy (Winter 1999) that "trading will enable the United States and other wealthy nations to buy their way out of their obligations to reduce greenhouse emissions at home."

Indeed, many environmentalists view as immoral the concept that the sky is a resource for dumping greenhouse emissions. Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard, argues that it "removes the moral stigma that is properly associated with [pollution]." He says that a fee, unlike a fine, "makes pollution just another cost of doing business, like wages, benefits, and rent."

To Barnes' way of thinking, though, pollution long ago became part of the corporate profit/loss equation, and at a time when free-market ideology has trumped government idealism, we can no longer count on moral stigma. "Environmentalists rarely talk about ownership of nature. In part, this silence is attributable to their feeling that nature is sacred and shouldn't be commoditized--an appealing notion philosophically, but one that's no match for modern capitalism," he writes. "But the issue of who owns nature can no longer be ignored. For looming on the horizon, in the name of environmental protection, is a trillion-dollar giveaway that will affect all our descendants--or, if the opportunity is seized, a chance to modernize the venerable institution of the commons."

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