Our Common Wealth

FOREWORD

by Bill McKibben

In case you think there’s anything small or secondary about the idea of the commons, in case you think it a molehill to the mountain of our economy, consider the issue that lies athwart our progress as a civilization: climate change.

One economist after another has described climate change as a “market failure,” the greatest of all time, since without a price attached to use of the atmosphere we continue to pollute it with abandon. But the solution to climate change requires us to understand that the atmosphere is a commons. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to all of us. And if Exxon and other fossil fuel companies want to use it as a dump, they need to compensate us at a rate that leads to the rapid technological ...