In Part I of this column, we asked: Can we use the BP oil spill to create systems which protect our shared resources in a way that is fair, transparent and profitable for all of us? Here’s why we must try.
Three Types of Commons
As Americans, we are familiar with the famous words of our founders that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. But we are also endowed with certain irreplaceable gifts. And these gifts are the common assets handed down to us that we all share.
In his book Capitalism 3.0 – A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, author Peter Barnes describes three categories of shared gifts: natural gifts like seeds, topsoil, minerals, wetlands, and solar energy; community gifts like streets, playgrounds, holidays, museums, capital markets, laws, and money; and cultural gifts like language, religion, music, science, the airwaves, and open source software. These common gifts allow our social, political and economic systems to function. Indeed, without the gift of natural resources, we wouldn’t survive at all.
This means we have a shared responsibility to preserve these gifts for other species and future generations. Or as Bill McDonough says, we have a responsibility to design a system which works for “all children, of all species, for all time.”
Whose Oil is it Anyway?
The first step in designing this type of system is to re-envision our roles in society. As citizens we are not just consumers and employees. We are also co-owners of America’s forests, minerals, and coastlines. As citizens, we are the owners of our parks and plazas, our freeways and waterways. We are the owners of our airwaves, our public universities and our intellectual property. And as taxpayers, we are investors in the future of these shared resources.
In the wake of the oil spill President Obama committed BP to setting up a $20 billion escrow account to provide for the victims. But what if we had public trust funds not just for the victims of the disaster, but for the owners of these natural resources in the first place?
As Congressman Markey pointed out in a recent hearing, “Right now every single one of the companies here today and dozens of others are drilling for free in the Gulf of Mexico on leases that will cost American taxpayers more than $50 billion dollars in lost royalties.”
And Big Oil is not the only industry that uses government influence to generate enormous profits at taxpayer expense. In Barnes’ book he offers numerous examples:
These tax breaks and subsidies represent profits not just of 30% or 100%, but 5000 percent, 100,000 percent or in the case of broadcasters – “an incredible 1,400,000 percent return on their investment.” Time Magazine’s recent cover story “The Best Laws Money can Buy” details how lobbyists were paid $15 million to fight for a provision in the financial reform bill that would save the firms who hired them $10 billion in taxes.
This type of influence dominates the system of politics no matter which party is in power. It’s really no wonder that oil companies can generate trillions of dollars in profits, maintain billions of dollars in government subsidies, and spend virtually nothing on ensuring public safety or investing in renewable alternatives. Because this is how corporate power has designed the system to work.
Clearly, we need a new system.
Common Assets: One Person – One Share
As the world becomes a common global culture, and addresses shared global challenges like climate change, we must develop institutions that serve the common good and protect our common assets. In addition, we must develop an economic system that protects - rather than ignores - the interests of other species, ecosystems, and future generations; because their collapse threatens us all. (As I’ve argued in the past, Mother Nature is definitely “too big to fail.”)
One way to do this is to establish legal structures that pay people dividends – one-person-one-share – of the revenues generated by these common assets. Thankfully there are many such models in existence. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a prime example.
In the 1970’s the Republican governor of Alaska pushed for a system where 25% of the state’s oil revenue flows into the Alaska Permanent Fund, “to be invested on behalf of all Alaskans equally.” Since the 1980’s the fund has grown to over $30 billion dollars. Invested in stocks and bonds, it will continue to pay out annual dividends to all Alaskans even after the oil runs out. Barnes writes, “Economist Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate and libertarian scholar at the Cato Institute, has called it “a model governments all over the world would be well-advised to copy.”
What if we were to adopt such a system nationally?
The Cantwell-Collins CLEAR act takes a step in this direction by introducing a “cap-and-dividend” approach to pollution pricing. I wrote about this recently in “Why Congress should take a CLEAR approach to Climate Change.” This system would pay all Americans equally for the profits generated by putting a price on carbon – which economists unanimously agree is the first step toward weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. As Bill McKibbens writes in On The Commons, “Cap-and-dividend makes sense to people— it sounds fair. It also sounds post-partisan: It’s a new way of thinking about taxation that should appeal to conservatives as easily as liberals.”
Creating institutions that reward all citizens equally for their stake in stewarding natural resources would go a long way toward overcoming the political stalemate we face on weaning ourselves from fossil fuels and investing in clean energy.
Beyond natural resources, there are many other valuable common assets that could also be used to create a public trust fund, including our regulated stock markets, our patent and copyright protection, and our digital bandwidth. If corporations wanting to use these assets paid a small percentage off the top to the owners – we the people – then an “American Permanent Fund” worth trillions of dollars could be established to protect common assets, manage them profitably, and distribute the dividends equally.
As the nation watched - impotent to stop the oil gushing from that broken pipe deep in the Gulf - we must know that unless we act, we will be powerless to prevent the next accident as well. And the next disaster might not be in our financial or energy systems, but in the systems we depend on for food and water.
If we do nothing more than swab the beaches and pay financial reparations, it’s inevitable that we will see more environmental and economic disasters, and we will again be asked to bear the burden and bail out the perpetrators. If we don’t make the effort to establish a new set of institutions to protect our common assets, then they will continue to be privatized, consumed, and destroyed.
To prevent future disasters we must look beyond the blow-out preventers and cynical CEOs, and redesign the political and market systems that continually create these crises. To fight global warming and create a clean energy economy we must develop blended institutions that give every citizen not just a vote, but an actual share in the system.
And we must do it soon, because the next Tragedy of the Commons is only a matter of time.
Andy Mannle is a writer and consultant dedicated to exploring sustainable policy, innovations, and solutions. He is the Education Director for West Coast Green, and an adviser to New Leaf America, UrbanGreen, Adam Capital and others.
