Tax Nations to Repair the Earth : Global Commons Trust Fund Would Raise Millions for the Job

The global environment is in peril. Forests are being stripped, stressed and burned. Lands once arable are yielding to desert. The atmosphere is under assault. Wetlands are vanishing. The oceans are being choked with pollution and fished beyond sustainable levels. We are disturbing the climate and decimating species.

All this and more is being said every day; why repeat it? What we need now are answers. Mine is a Global Commons Trust Fund.

The “global commons” refers to sectors of the planet above and beyond the territory of any nation: the atmosphere, the high seas and their seabeds, the regions of space fit for satellites and space stations. Currently, because these areas are in effect “unowned,” they can be used and abused by anyone with relative impunity.

If we were to rectify this practice, and charge even a fraction of fair worth for the various uses to which nation-states put the global commons, we would advance two goals at once. The charges would both dampen the intensity of abuse and underwrite the expense of mending the remaining damage.

Let me just play with some figures, to convey the magnitude of what we are talking about.

Start with the oceans. The world harvests 200 billion pounds of fish annually. A tax of only one-tenth of 1% of the commercial value would raise about $50 million. The same token rate on offshore oil and gas would add $75 million.

There is another, dirtier use to which the world community puts the oceans: as a dump site for waste. The official figures, almost certainly under-reported, amount to 212 million metric tons of sewage sludge, industrial wastes and dredged materials yearly. A tax of only $1 a ton would raise $200 million more.

Nations use the atmosphere as they use the oceans--as a cost-free sewer for pollutants. By burning fossil fuels and forests, humankind thrusts 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. A carbon tax of only a dime a ton would raise $700 million, more than 10 times the current budget of United Nations Environmental Programme. The same dime-a-ton tax on sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide would produce another $30 million.

The total thus far: more than $1 billion. And that is before adding the yield of a tax on chlorofluorocarbons and halons, on toxic incineration at sea, on the liquid wastes that invade the oceans from rivers.

Consider also fees for the minerals that someday will be taken from the seabed and for uses of space, such as the rights to radio frequencies and positions for Earth-orbiting satellites.

Many people will object that it is outrageous to permit pollution-for-pay. Yet, some pollution is inevitable, and it is more of an outrage that we let the polluters get away with it, as they presently do, free of charge.

Indeed, if there is a real objection, it is that the initial rates I have suggested are too paltry. Viewed as a damage-reduction strategy, they are unlikely to confront the polluting nations with the full costs of the harm they are causing the global environment, and therefore will fall short of inducing the “right” amount of conservation and pollution-control measures.

Viewed from the flip side, as a strategy for maximizing revenues for the environmental infrastructure, they fall short of extracting the full value of what users would pay (for their ocean-dumping, for example) if they were required to bid for the rights at auction. And even the bottom lines appear too modest. The United States’ share, which, unsurprisingly, is the largest on my calculations, would amount to only $230 million, less than half the price of one Stealth bomber.

Nonetheless, in total, the funds would finance measures that everyone agrees are necessary: improved global monitoring and modeling; development of adaptive strategies, such as fast-growing trees; gathering and storage of genetic material; enforcement of safer methods of waste disposal.

The infrastructure to do those jobs is there. It includes, along with the U.N. program, such organizations as the World Meteorological Organization, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which serves as a sort of umbrella for hundreds of government and private organizations. They are capable of doing first-rate work. What they need now is money.

Not every country will blithely submit. There will be resistance among the developing nations. But they do not face the highest levies, and the fund therefore does not depend on them.

Some countries will object to any tax on activities within their territories, or, in the case of the coastal states, within their self-proclaimed “exclusive economic zones.” But the charge is not for what nations do on the “inside”; it is for the effects of their activities on the “outside” world.

It is true that superficially similar proposals have failed to make much headway in the past; but those were widely perceived as roundabout schemes to take from the rich nations and give to the poor. The Global Commons Trust Fund is different, and more saleable. It simply seeks from users of the commons a fee for their use so as to apply it back to the commons, for the maintenance and repair of the Earth. Could anything be more sensible or timely?