Product Description

Global warming has finally made clear the true costs of using our atmosphere as a giant sponge to soak up unwanted by-products of industrial activity. As nations, businesses, and citizens seek workable yet fair solutions for reducing carbon emissions, the question of who should pay-and how-looms large. Yet the surprising truth is that a system for protecting the atmosphere could be devised that would yield cash benefits to us all.

In Who Owns the Sky?, visionary entrepreneur Peter Barnes redefines the debate about the costs and benefits of addressing climate change. He proposes a market-based institution called a Sky Trust that would set limits on carbon emissions and pay dividends to all of us, who collectively own the atmosphere as a commons. The Trust would be funded by requiring polluters to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide, and managed by a non-governmental agency. Dividends would be paid annually, in much the same way that residents of Alaska today receive cash benefits from oil companies that drill in their state.

Employing the same spirit of innovation that brought millions of dollars to the nonprofit sector through his company Working Assets, Barnes sets forth a practical new approach to protecting our shared inheritance-not only the atmosphere, but water, forests, and other life-sustaining and economically valuable common resources. He shows how we can use markets and property rights to preserve and share the vast wealth around us, allowing us not only to profit from it, but to pass it on, undiminished, to future generations.

Who Owns the Sky? is a remarkable look at the future of our economy, one in which we can retain capitalism's virtues while mitigating its vices. Peter Barnes draws on his personal experience as a successful entrepreneur to offer viable solutions to some of our most pressing environmental and social concerns.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #903844 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Barnes (The People's Land), cofounder and former president of the "socially responsible" financial services company Working Assets, argues that natural resource management urgently needs rethinking, since the atmosphere's capacity for absorbing carbon gas emissions is severely tested every day. While not an alarmist, he cites recent statistics (e.g., between 1923 and 1991, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air grew from 298 to 355 parts per million, and the earth's average surface temperature rose from 57.4 to 58.0 F) and insists that we need new solutions. In Barnes's view, the problem is that we view the sky and other natural resources as free and thus use them as if they're unlimited. Moving beyond what he regards as standard eco-hand-wringing, Barnes discusses the successes of cap-and-trade systems in reducing emissions of sulfur, lead and other pollutants, and proposes a similar market-based approach for carbon dioxide. Barnes's system of pricing permits is modeled in part on Alaska's plan, in which oil companies that drill in the state make payments that are distributed to Alaska residents through a dividend-producing trust. He likewise proposes that the revenues from emissions-permit sales should go to the public, with each citizen receiving an equal monetary share. In this very brief and disappointingly thin sketch of his system (he leaves the nuts and bolts to others), Barnes frequently sounds as if he's making a repetitive sales pitch. Skeptics on both the left (who may not buy his free-market solutions) and the right (who may object to yet another tax on business) are unlikely to be moved by this book.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In 1985 Barnes cofounded Working Assets, a long-distance telephone service provider that sets aside a portion of each customer's bill to donate to social and environmental causes. He now proposes a market-based solution to the problem of atmospheric pollution. A nongovernmental institution called the Sky Trust would set limits on carbon emissions and charge companies for the "right" to pollute. In much the same way that Alaskan residents receive "dividends" from income earned on the state's oil leases, citizens would collect money paid to the Sky Trust by polluters. Money from the trust would also be used to balance the effects of higher fuel prices. Barnes meticulously documents why the earth's atmosphere is invaluable, and he catalogs the damaging effects of carbon dioxide emissions before detailing how the Sky Trust would operate. He compares the sky to pastures or woodlands historically used collectively by commoners and considers how the principles behind the Sky Trust might be applied to other so-called commons or societal assets such as biodiversity, the airwaves, and quietude. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Peter Barnes is co-founder and president of the socially responsible telephone company Working Assets. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Customer Reviews

Visionary book
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.

A populist, and realist, just transition proposal!
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 recognise

The 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.

Corporations Own the Sky?
In the book, Who Owns the Sky?, Peter Barnes makes a compelling and interesting theoretical argument of the need to address a systematic problem, which is how to allocate common resources and issue them a value in a manner congruent to capitalism. Barnes's revelation examines the idea of the putting a price on our common assets (natural resources) through our capitalistic market ideals. The market, therefore, would set prices on natural resources that the common people of our country have inherited through mutual ownership, and use the ideas of the market to charge for the use and exploitation of the resources. This idea of placing ownership of natural resources into a common trust is Barnes's most dynamic point or theory. His theory basically would charge anyone (mainly corporations) exploiting the resources and give the money back to the people in dividends. The companies that are environmentally sound would also be given subsidies for taking the effort reduce resource use or degradation.
A trust is a legally supported concept of an entity designed to hold and manage assets or in this case natural resources for the well being of the people, the beneficiaries. Barnes uses this democratic idea in a modern way where resources and their value can be assimilated into capitalism without throwing off the market. His catastrophic finding is that people will benefit from dividends and more importantly the wealth and health of environment will become sustainable through the market. This theoretical scheme seems like a solution that would the allow the environment and capitalism to mutually coexist in some form of harmony, which almost seems like an oxymoron.
This book was an excellent road map for a feasible change in democracy for the better. Capitalism would be able to continue thriving, the environment could begin thriving, and the people of this democracy would actually get rewarded in a fair way for the abstinence in resource use and abuse. However, my optimism in Barnes's theory is minute because of the corporation's ability to act as such a catalyst in the government's decision making. Corporations have so much money that I find it hard to believe Barnes's theory is highly plausible. The corporations will use every mechanism in the book including, lobbying, donations to high government officials, and mass communication to disable the theory of a general trust that would take money from the rich and give to the poor.
The last argument against Barnes's theory of a general trust is the idea of capitalism in itself. Big government involvement is a taboo issue where less is more. The idea of a trust is seen as a socialist idea where the government intervenes with the innocent corporations in attempt to play good cop, bad cop.
Who Owns the Sky?, is an incredible book with magnificent ideas, but the answer to the question of who owns the sky is simple. As of right now the corporations do and to change that would take more than a theory that benefits the people as a whole, but rather a theory that somehow benefits the driving force of the market, the corporations.