If Donald Trump Owned the Atmosphere

Great Debates
1

If the atmosphere were privately owned, and we had to pay a fee to dump auto exhaust and other pollutants into it, just as if it were a privately-owned landfill, we would certainly think twice before doing so.

So my question is, do the difficult logistics of atmospheric property as a concept necessarily preclude its emergence as a solution to atmospheric pollution? As someone who is generally pro-business with libertarian leanings, private ownership is an attractive solution to a whole host of environmental problems. Simply put, you take better care of that which you own.

Has this ever been seriously looked into? The concept is as alien as private land ownership must have been to native Americans, but I do wonder if it would be an improvement over our current way of thinking.

2

So as long you can afford to dump 5000 tons of hydrogen cyanide into the air it’s alright to do so?

Ofcourse, the people that you poison are free to sue you.

3

How could you possibly ‘slice up’ the sky? If people could own huge columns of the atmosphere correlating to the land area underneath for instance, could they sue me for the toxic emissions I had pumped out miles away which had drifted across due to a chaotic weather system? How would you even monitor levels of different gas in your particular, incredibly tall, slice?

4

Had you thought of this back in 1937, and written a paper about it, you might have won the Nobel Prize.

Air pollution is what economists refer to as a negative externality - along with overfishing, noise/light pollution, congestion on the roads, etc. Basically, externalities result when people do not have to face the full cost of their actions - a polluter does not have for the damage his pollution does to others, a driver on the highway does not have to pay for the delay he causes for others, etc.

In economics, the Coase Theorem says that in the absence of transaction costs, allocation of property rights will resolve externalities efficiently, regardless of how those property rights are initially allocated (because people will bargain for them). Economic efficiency means, basically, “for the lowest possible total cost to society”.

So, according to that theorem, letting Donald Trump own the air would be an efficient solution to air pollution, global warming, and what have you. The effect would be the same as letting me own the air - or distributing ownership of the air individually among all citizens in the US (i.e. each citizen is given the right to emit 1 ton of CO2, 2 tons of SO2, 5 tons of particulates, etc.). The critical factor here is that people are able to buy and sell these rights: how they are distributed initially does not affect the cost to society.

Giving all rights to Donald Trump would make him even richer - but from the standpoint of economic efficiency, that is irrelevant. The cost to society would still be minimized, regardless of whether Donald Trump becomes a lot richer, I become a lot richer, or everyone becomes a little richer.

Why doesn’t anyone do this? Well, there are three arguments against it: first, the theorem only holds if transaction costs are insigificant, and one could argue that they would not be. Additionally, one could argue that enforcement of property rights to the air would be difficult. And finally, realistically, determining how to fairly distribute air pollution property rights initially would be difficult.

Personally, I don’t think these problems are insurmountable. In general, economic theory gives us a way out of basically every social and environmental problem we have. But politicians (and people in general) are idiots who don’t understand economics.

5

The government would decide on a limit for emissions of <pollutant X>, and each year hold an auction for permits to emit one ton of <pollutant X>. Companies wishing to pollute would have to purchase them for whatever the market price is. If they can’t afford the market price, they can’t pollute, and have to either go out of business, or find a way to limit their emissions.

If the government wished to reduce the amount of pollutants in the air, they could decrease the number of permits they sold each year. If an environmental group wanted to limit pollution even further, they could buy permits themselves and just sit on them.

The European Union has tried a scheme like this for CO2 emissions in Europe, and Al Gore has been calling for one in the US. There are some problems with the EU’s version, but those are due to a bad implementation, not a flaw in the theory.

So, if the goverment decides to allow 5000 tons of cyanide emissions, and you can afford to outbid everyone else who wants to to emit cyanide in a given year, you are free to do so. If the government decides to allow only one ton of cyanide emissions, or none at all, you can’t emit more, regardless of whether you can afford it.

Contrast this to a scheme in which cyanide emissions were merely taxed, or fined - then, you really could emit as much as you wanted, if you could afford it.

6

Ofcourse, the system of vouchers doesn’t rely on privatisation of the air. And I don’t think that the OP was referring to the kind of restrictions you’re talking about (and I actually think might work).

The OP appeared to be talking about a metering system for pollution, in that you could dump as much as you could afford to. The government would have no right to limit the amounts of pollutants as they wouldn’t own the air, and also doing so would restrict the air owner’s ability to make profit (from charging fees for pollution).

In the OP’s system if I could afford to dump 5000 tons of HCN I could, and the only person who coudl stop me would be the air owner, and then to do so would be restricting his ability to make money (and that would probably piss off his shareholders, and could actually be illegal).

7

What’s the penalty for exceeding your allotted share of pollutants?

8

Prison?

9

corporate prison?

10

The problem you refer to is colloquially known as The Tragedy of the Commons, or as Aristotle would have it, “For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.” In other words, from an individual perspective, it is better to make the most of the shared resource you have available to you know rather than wait for someone else to consume or utilize it, and you tend to think first of your "family’ (in the case of businesses, shareholders and owners) rather than in the general public interest.

As for private ownership of the atmosphere, It’s not at all clear how this would work in both legal and practical contexts. It’s an established principle of property law that easements must be recognized to allow someone to use a legally held resource or real property that is otherwise not in contradiction of the common good, so there’s no way legally to segregate your air from Trump’s air, or whatnot. If you’re hypothetically suggesting that we grant Donald Trump (or whomever you like) monopolistic ownership of the atmosphere and the right to bill polluters of it then you could make some kind of case, but that’s no more free market than having a government agency regulate emissions; worse, in fact, because not only is Trump not acting in the public interest (which, even in libertarian philosophy, is the province of goverment bodies) but he’ll actually be maximizing his own profits at the expense of competing interests and the unrepresented public-at-large.

As a practical matter, I can’t see how this would possibly work. Each individual would have to be granted a certain amount of credits for personal use (or pay a fee for ownership of polluting devices like vehicles and gas-powered appliances), and then charged or fined for excess pollution; similiarly, businesses would have to be metered to determine their pollution output, which would require your Atmosphere Cartel to have unmittigated access to both records and polluting machines or processes. And who would arbitrate disagreements between Trump and whomever he accuses of excess pollution?

And the opportunities are rife for corruption and near-term profit at expense of the overall resource; what’s to stop Trump from granting exemptions to a certain manufacturer or industry in return for a profitable interest at the expense of the public welfare? As it happens, we do in fact have a regulated free market of emissions commodities, trading the rights to pollute for profit. One can argue that there are flaws in the way the EPA and other regulatory bodies administrate this system, or that it necessarily involves a bloated bureaucracy whose primary interest is self-preservation, but regardless the overseeing administration of these bodies is at least nominally controlled by a public (assuming democratic representation) to which the representatives of these organizations are responsible.

There are arguments for privatizing many government functions and deregulating government controlled or granted industries (although in reality deregulation has largely meant moving collective interests from the control of a single government body to a progressively reducing number of private interests with little overall improvement of service or reduction of cost) but privatizing the management of common resources from the private, representative sector to private industry has little to recommend it.

Stranger

11

I think they have started trading pollution rights in Europe. It kinda works and it kinda doesn’t.

12

Actually, I believe the pollution rights trading was first implemented here in the U.S. for the case of pollutants such as SO2 and nitrous oxides (?) that cause acid rain. It has generally worked quite well.

Of course, the two big issues for such a cap-and-trade system that come up are:

(1) How will the permits initially be distributed?

(2) What should the cap be?

For example, Bush…in his Clear Skies Initiative…proposed extending this trading system as a replacement for the Clean Air Act. The main problem that environmentalists had with this was that, while the initial proposal that the EPA presented as a “straw man” to the electric utilities had fairly stringent caps that truly would have led to about the same (perhaps even slightly lower) emissions than the EPA estimated would occur through the Clean Air Act, by the time the utilities and the White House got through with the proposal, the caps were much higher. [They were miraculously still lower than the “baseline” Clean Air Act case but that was only because that baseline case had been changed to what was dubbed the “Rip Van Winkle” scenario where the EPA goes to sleep and doesn’t issue any further regulations to force compliance with the Clean Air Act than are on the books today. Since this scenario would definitely put them in violation of the Clean Air Act…and thus open to lawsuit by environmental groups for violating laws passed by Congress…that is not a realistic scenario.]

A third issue that comes up is when one is dealing with pollutants whose effects are quite local. For example, when the Bush Administration proposed applying cap-and-trade to mercury, some argued that this could lead to a situation where there were mercury “hot spots”. With greenhouse gas emissions, this is a non-issue as CO2 and most of the other greenhouse gases are well-mixed in the atmosphere so it doesn’t matter where they are emitted from.

13

Nothing to add here, except to say…

You can’t take the sky from me![/firefly]

14

Nitric oxides I believe. Nitrous oxide is laughing gas and is inert. Nitric oxide is unbelievably corrosive. Stoners have occasionally killed themselves for not knowing the difference, so you should too! :wink:

15

The trouble with enclosing the commons for the atmosphere is that the atmosphere doesn’t stay put like other objects do. You can have private ownership of land, you can have private ownership of minerals, you can have private ownership of factories, but if Donald Trump owns one chunk of air, and I own another chunk of air, there’s no way for Trump to keep his air from leaking into my private property, and there’s no way for me to keep my air from leaking into his private property.

So under a libertarian scheme, we could say that Trump has the absolute right to pollute his air all he wants, he just has no right to let that polluted air leak into my property. But Trump can’t do that. In practical terms it would mean an absolute ban on emissions of any sort, and also segregation of atmosphere too. Except we can’t do that either, since every human and animal and on earth needs to breathe oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide, and every plant needs intake CO2 and excrete O2, as well as take in oxygen and excrete CO2 when metabolizing. Since cavemen times humans have burned campfires as well.

Thing is, private property rights to the atmosphere and hydrosphere are completely unworkable. Perhaps if we lived in artificial habitats we could achieve the libertarian utopia of charging people for the air they breathe, but as long as we live under the open atmosphere there’s no practical way to accomplish this.

And so we have to live with either an anarchic atmospheric commons, or a regulated atmospheric commons, the laws of physics demand it, no matter how it might offend our economic sensibilities to have a commons at all. The commons exists, and we have to deal with that fact of nature as best we can. And so we have an agreement that people can breathe in the common air and exhale their metabolic wastes into the common air. And their domestic animals too. But we might also have an agreement that although in ancient times (like, say 100 years ago) people had the unlimited right to dump any amount of particulates and chemicals of any sort into the atmosphere and hydrosphere, if we continue that process then the atmospheric and hydrospheric commons will be destroyed.

The recognition that the atmosphere IS a commons enables us to enact rules to prevent it’s destruction. Perhaps not as efficient as if we could divide up the commons into private property, but still. So although we don’t allow unlimited grazing of sheep on the commons any more, we are not faced with the false dillemna of either allowing the commons to turn into a desert or privatize it, there are other solutions. Like, restricting the right to graze on the commons to every other week on a rotating basis, rather than every day like before. Argh, we’re losing our precious rights! Government intrusion! Man the barricades! Except once we realize that the atmosphere/pasture is a commons, and that the commons is not unlimited as was thought in the past, and that the commons cannot be enclosed due to the laws of physics, our ancient rights to unlimited pollution MUST be regulated, we have no choice.

16

It would be called the “Trumposphere” and would be the greatest atmosphere in history!

17

I think steep fines would be more appropriate.

Your awfully flippant about forcing companies to go out of business. People need their jobs for going to and working at and such. A clean atmosphere is little comfort if that’s all people have over their head since they can’t find jobs.

18

And, conversely, a job is of no comfort to people with pollution-related respiratory (or other) ailments - especially the ones who die.
As nice as it would be to go all extreme and say one thing is important to the exclusion of all else, it simply bears no relation to the world we actually live in.

19

Nawww, I hear it’s FPMITAtmosphereP.

20

Do steep fines keep corporations, or even individuals, from doing anything bad now? Especially when courts, lawyers, and other forces work hard to reduce or eliminate them, or keep them financially insignificant to those being fined (or perhaps they’re that insignificant in the first place)?