The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Peter Barnes

PETER BARNES is co-founder and former president of Working Assets Long Distance. He spoke with us about his work safeguarding our common wealth.

I was a businessman for twenty years. Before I cofounded Working Assets, I was in the solar energy business. I've always tried to push the capitalist system toward doing the right thing — environmentally and socially — as far as I thought it could be pushed.

There's nothing wrong with supporting socially responsible businesses, but as long as that support is voluntary, it will never result in the systemic, massive change that we need. When I retired about ten years ago, I stepped back and decided to think about capitalism more systemically. The more I looked around, the more I saw this pattern of corporate destruction of the commons. I began to see that there was a core algorithm of our current operating system. If this isn't changed, there's no way we're going to get out of this mess.

The big idea in my book Capitalism 3.0 is that we need to fix our economic operating system before it destroys the planet, and the way to do that is by rebuilding the commons. Our commons — air, water and ecosystems of all sorts, plus our great cultural and information commons, and all of the things that bind us together as a community, everything from streets to the Internet and the airways — all of these things are under attack. They're under attack by private corporations that want to enclose them or take valuable stuff from them or dump waste into them. That's just the way our economic operating system works.

I use the metaphor of the computer operating system because the destruction of the commons is systemic. It can't be stopped by tinkering at the edges. It's something that is a built-in characteristic of capitalism as we know it, and unless we fix that operating system, we're not going to be able to stop the destruction.

We're really close to a tipping point regarding climate change, a huge tragedy of the commons. And so we have to rebuild an economic sector, the common sector if you will, to include institutions, such as land trusts, water trusts and forest trusts, to protect these commons.

About five years ago, I began to develop the idea of the sky trust, something that can be established at a national, regional or state level. For example, California is capping carbon emissions. It's possible to cap carbon in a way that preserves the atmosphere as a commons, as something that belongs to everybody. The way to do this is to auction the permits instead of giving them away. The permits are auctioned to polluters who want to use them in the future as payment for dumping wastes into the atmosphere, which belongs to everyone. The trust would receive the revenues from the auction, and could then use them for the common good.

How that money would be spent, of course, would be subject to political discussion. Those discussions could include everything from paying per capita dividends, as Alaska does with its oil revenues, to putting it into public education and universities, as Texas does with its oil revenues. There's a lot of value in this common resource, the atmosphere.

One analogy might be parking meters. A parking meter is something that we put on a public street because there's a scarcity of parking spaces. We make parkers pay, and we limit the amount of time that they can park. The revenue that they put into those meters goes to the city, which is used for public goods. We would never think of giving those parking meters to General Motors, for example, and letting them collect the fees for use of public space. That's unthinkable, and yet it's a very analogous situation to what could happen with the atmosphere.

I have been a businessman, and so I approach this from the standpoint of somebody who has been in the game. We live in a global capitalist economy, and we have to send signals to the market and to corporations that will make them do the right thing. Fixing our economic system will require us to make fundamental changes. Even though these changes are fundamental, I don't think they're actually that hard. They don't require us to give up most of what we like about capitalism: markets, property rights and all the rest. Corporations will continue to do what they do, but they'll be offset by this commons sector, which has the ability to say, in effect, to the corporations: You shall not tread here, or if you do tread here you can only tread a little, and you'll have to pay for the privilege of doing so.

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