Proposed by social thinker and author Peter Barnes the Sky Trust is a new form of social institution, serving new social, economic and environmental purposes.
In form, the Trust would be neither a private nor governmental entity Instead it would sit somewhere within the part of our social structure known as the civil sector. The Trust would be made up of an international board of trustees with a minimal supporting secretariat, and have access to scientific and economic advice. The primary purpose of the Trust is to ensure that a certain benefit of nature is shared equally among all citizens. Its secondary purpose is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases currently threatening the world's climate.
The Trust would work as what is technically known as a ’cap-and-trade system' of pollution licensing. It would seek to ’cap' pollution by limiting the issue of pollution permits and it would allow for the free ’trade' of those permits. Those who pollute less can gain by selling to those who pollute more. Permits are fixed term and the Trust collects their value fixed by the market through periodic reissues.
The operation of the Trust would effect the reduction of climate-threatening atmospheric pollution. It would do this through ’internalising' the cost of pollution to the industry that generates the environmental damage a cost which is presently ’externalised' from its balance sheets. In this way the sky's ability to absorb carbon emissions could be regulated so that pollution never exceeds what the atmosphere can recover from.
It's a simple idea: “initial emission rights are given to a trust, which periodically sells them to polluters and distributes the revenue to all citizens equally says Barnes. In his view the Trust can be viewed as “a scarcity rent recycling machine, in which “we, the users, pay scarcity rent for the sky because it's scarce. We, the owners, then get back our share of the scarcity rent because we're the owners.
“The Sky Trust's mission would be to preserve the mix of gases in the sky [upon which life depends]. Its trustees would be accountable not only to citizens alive today, but also to citizens yet unborn. They'd have three legal responsibilities: (1) to issue carbon burning permits up to a limit established [democratically]; (2) to receive market prices for those permits; and (3) to distribute the income equally [among all citizens]. Barnes comments: “These responsibilities, as it turns out, are consistent to remarkable degree. In the event there were a conflict between the trustees' responsibilities, preservation of the sky would take precedence.
Barnes describes his Sky Trust as “a non-governmental institution...that charges market prices for polluting the atmosphere and pays each of us an equal dividend. Offering a useful economic solution to one of the biggest environmental problems.
Peter Gibb
www.SkyOwners.org
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