Peter Barnes Wants to Commodify the Sky

Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, before the war on terrorism, one of Americans' main policy concerns was global warming. News organizations were reporting as recently as September 9 that the effects of global warming would be melting glaciers, drowning islands, vanishing wildlife. And among the newer items in this journalism was that our most cherished vacation spots may soon cease to exist. No more coral reefs, come 2050. An ice-free Mount Kilimanjaro, come 2015. The South Pacific Island of Tuvali and Kiribati, evacuated and submerged, along potentially with Venice, well before the end of the century.

The proof for all this came from a third assessment report of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in June. Its findings were confirmed by a panel of top American scientists -- including previous skeptics -- and now are considered the most authoritative global-warming statement to date.

Yet the impact of this report was minimal. Perhaps because it did not get significant television play. Perhaps because Americans were too distracted by the story of Gary Condit's extramarital behavior and the disappearance of Shandra Levy.

But it's time to look at the problem of climate change once again, if possible, lest all public policy issues get swept permanently under the carpet by our current anxieties about -- and the government's almost exclusive focus on -- terrorism, retaliation and war.

One place to start is "Who Owns the Sky?", a new book by Peter Barnes, the founder of the socially responsible telephone service Working Assets. His main solution to global warming, incredibly enough, is that pollution can be profitable. Barnes argues that the U.S. should claim its portion of the sky as a scarce resource that is neither free nor cheap, and force polluters to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide, much the way companies must now pay to dispose of other kinds of waste.

This is a sensible solution that is at the basis of previous global warming treaties, which have called for carbon cap-and-trading systems between developed and developing countries. But Barnes' Sky Trust takes the idea a step further. He argues that, through the Sky Trust, all current and future U.S. citizens should become beneficiaries of what the polluters pay, an amount he calculates could generate $140 billion to $280 billion a year.

"Those who burn more carbon will pay more than those who burn less," he writes. "If you drive a sports utility vehicle, you'll use more of the 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 overusers of the sky to underusers. Economizers will be rewarded, squanders will pay."

Barnes' book is full of such detail. He imagines the Sky Trust being passed in 2003 when Congress passes the "Atmospheric Protection Act" by a two-to-one majority. He envisions Americans registering online at www.skytrustorg or at any bank, credit card company or savings institution in order to collect their dividends. He proposes the trust be a federally chartered institution that would 1) issue carbon burning permits established by Congress, 2) receive market prices for those permits and 3) distribute the income equally.

Even Barnes admits it is an utterly idealistic plan and impossible to implement during the Bush administration. But his point in "Who Owns the Sky?" is not so much to provide a blueprint (though the detail of the Sky Trust belies a businessman's love of business plans) as to foster an argument about possible market solutions for global warming and other ills.

"I think if we're going to survive in a world where capitalism is the only game," said Barnes in an interview, "we have to make capitalism reflect the true costs of our industrial economy, our wasteful industrial economy."