Who Owns the Sky?: Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism

Review of ‘Who Owns The Sky’ by Peter Barnes pub Island Press 2001Chris RoseThis is a great little book that should be read by any environmentalist who really wants to save the atmosphere. Original and iconoclastic, its main fault is that it is so packed with big and new ideas so that it is in danger of being overlooked as too complicated.Really it should be called ‘Let’s Own The Sky’ as it’s a rationale and rallying cry to take the common asset of the sky into common (as distinct from state) ownership. Barnes suggests a way to get Americans (or anyone) to take a stake in the sky as a waste disposal resource, and then charge for polluting it. Americans want to protect the climate says Barnes, but only if they can do so without any economic pain. Done right, via a ‘sky trust,’ Barnes says, would be a money-earner for most. Result – incentives to pollute less.In the Barnes plan a Sky Trust would be funded by emission permits sold to energy companies at the top of the ‘carbon chain.’ The revenues would be paid out to citizens in equal dividends, like the Alaska Permanent Fund does with that State’s oil revenues. Barnes is an entrepreneur with impeccable capitalist if Californian credentials. He has proposed a cap-and-trade system which charges polluters rather than handing out emission rights for nothing. As such it might appeal to less-government libertarians and egalitarian environmentalists alike. ...and you can get a notional non-transfer-able share of America’s sky. Barnes has a blueprint but is it a Bushprint ? Where else though is George Bush to go if he is to regain any credibility on the climate, after rashly rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty accepted by every other nation ? America needs some fresh thinking and this might be it.

Who Owns The Sky?: Our Common Assets And The Future Of Capitalism offers opinions and economical solutions to the complex problem of global warming. Author Peter Barnes (cofounder and president ofthe socially responsibile telephone company "Working Assets") argues persuasively in favor of treating the sky as a commonly owned asset, through a non-governmental Sky Trust that would charge rent for carbon emissions and pay equal yearly dividends, which would make the burden easier to bear for workers and firms that have the most difficult transition to a lower-carbon economy. A unique melding of capitalism, enlightened self-interest, environmentalism, and hope for the future, Who Owns The Sky? is just what the world needs most - a brainstorm of workable solutions to one of the potentially most monumental of global environmental problems.

Who Owns the Sky is an excellent, very thought-provoking book. It raises deep enviromental issues, explains some complicated concepts quite elegantly, and then proposes a solution nothing short of brilliant. The book is very well written and beautifully reasoned. I particularly like the fact that it crosses all political lines. It's neither liberal nor conservative. Rather, it goes beyond both. Very 21st century. It's a whole new vision. Barnes is a visionary.

Unless you've been living on another planet, you're probably aware that pollution is threatening this one. If you're confused about what to do about it, or despairing that any solution is possible, read this book and stop weeping! Barnes offers an appropriately radical proposal to solve an extremely urgent problem--written in accessible, flowing, compelling prose. A must-read for inhabitants of planet earth.

I hate to disagree with the experts at the esteemed Publisher's Weekly, but Who Owns the Sky is an important book. It puts forward a very interesting transition proposal -- a Sky Trust -- based on the notion of per-capita rights to the earth's resources. Further, the Sky Trust may promise a way to manage the US's carbon emissions in a reasonably equitable manner, while at the same time providing enough money for a substantive "just transition" fund to help greenhouse losers like the coal miners.In other words, there is some actual new thinking here, which the weary experts at PW seem too expert to recogniseThe idea, in a nutshell, is that instead of grandfathering "the sky" away to, say, the corporations that already, in effect, squat it, emission permits would be auctioned, with the revenues going into a trust. Then, each year, 25% of the money would go to the transition fund, and each citizen would get a check (about $644 a year, in 2010, if carbon emission permits are $25 a ton) much as the citizens of Alaska get checks from the Alaska Permanent Trust, which is funded by mining and drilling royalties.One point to remember, here, is that mining and drilling are *very* popular in Alaska.There are problems, which I, being to the left of Barnes, am indeed bothered by. The "citizen" bit, for instance. And in my view Barnes takes too narrow of view of the transition problem, and is certainly wrong in thinking that a transition fund could or should be soon phased out. And there are a few others too, but I won't bother you with them just now. The important thing is that this is an important proposal, and that it has some political traction, which is particularly amazing given that it prominantly features the notion of per capita rights. It deserves, along with a few other currently emerging and more traditionally "progressive" ideas for just transition plans, be taken very seriously.Of course that would require us to be able to recognize an new idea when we see it. Don't look to Publisher's Weekly for help here.