Sky Trust

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0: Preface (pages ix.-xvi)

But who should own the sky? That question became a kind of Zen koan for me, a seemingly innocent query that, on reflection, opened many unexpected doors. I pondered the possibility of starting a planet-saving, for-profit, sky-owning business; after all, I’d done well by doing good before. When that didn’t seem right, I wondered what would happen if we, as a society, created a trust to manage the atmosphere on behalf of future generations, with present-day citizens as secondary beneficiaries. Such a trust would do exactly what Waste Management Inc. would do if it owned the sky: charge dumpers for filling its dwindling storage space. Pollution would cost more and there’d be steadily less of it. All this would happen, after the initial deeding of rights to the trust, without government intervention. But if this trust — not Waste Management Inc. or some other corporation — owned the sky, there’d be a wonderful bonus: every American would get a yearly dividend check.

This thought experiment turned into a proposal known as the sky trust and has made some political headway. It also served as the epicenter of my thinking about the commons, which led to this book. ... read the whole chapter