In this book, land is placed squarely in the middle of a three-dimensional study. We do this because the world has a great deal of experience in managing land resources, and this experience is bound to influence our approach to the management of other natural resources. In subsequent chapters we consider the management of resources that exist above and below the land. In this chapter we move laterally: from land to the water that surrounds it. In doing so, we move from the solid to the soft, in more ways than one.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, ours is a watery planet, yet we call it “earth”. As we noted in the introduction, seven-tenths of the earth's surface is covered by water. Because the sea is so vast, and because it runs so deep, something like 95 per cent of the habitable space on our planet is found under water. And yet the management of these vast marine resources receives remarkably little public or academic attention.

Like the resources found on land, water is also essential to our survival – in both its fresh and salty variants. This is both clear and obvious with respect to fresh water, which Vaclav Smil (2022: 173) describes as “a perfect example of an almost universally mismanaged resource, with the added complication of highly uneven access”. Indeed, on 28 July 2010 the UN General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to clean drinking water and sanitation with UN Resolution 64/292 (UN 2010). But our reliance on water stretches beyond this important UN resolution. In addition to our need to consume water, we need water to irrigate our crops and to provide habitats for additional human food sources, and water – in the form of hydroelectric power – is an important source of energy. These are the many aspects of water management that we wish we could address; each has its own list of challenges, and each has the potential to generate a Natural Dividend. But our focus in this chapter is on fish; in particular, on the farming of fish.

The world's largest Natural Dividends are generated in the markets for subsurface fossil and mineral resources. Given our lengthy and insatiable appetite for coal, gas, oil and precious minerals/metals, the Natural Dividends associated with these resources have been phenomenally large, drawing the attention of investors, governments and academics alike.

Consequently, it should not surprise us to find that these resources seem to be the most difficult to manage from a political perspective. Their markets have the capacity to generate unimaginable wealth, but most of the wealth never makes it back to the community. Instead, these Natural Dividends have been pocketed by corrupt political authorities and/or the subcontractors used to secure the resource. It is not without reason that Venezuela's former oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, spoke of oil as “the devil's excrement” (Starr 2007), and the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, feels the need to warn us of the extractive industry's “… litany of ills – corruption, exploitation, colonialism and racism; environmental degradation, worsening climate change and biodiversity loss; armed conflict, gender-based violence, population displacement, cultural harm and human rights violations” (Guterres 2021).

Some of these markets are destined to dry up. There is, after all, significant pressure on countries and companies to move away from fossil fuels and into more renewable forms of energy. But many of these new replacement resources are also located underground. For example, recent advances in subsurface technologies promise access to new sources of renewable geothermal energy from conventional hydrothermal and enhanced geothermal systems (US Department of Energy 2017). Existing technologies can already create subsurface reservoirs that offer safe storage capacity for carbon dioxide (CO2) and opportunities for the environmentally-responsible management and disposal of hazardous materials and other energy waste streams. Deep-drilling experiments have revealed a new terrestrial biosphere that “harbors a significant fraction of the total microbial biomass of the planet” (Puente-Sánchez et al. 2018), offering much work (and new markets) for bioprospectors. Further off on the temporal horizon we expect to find physicists, geologists and entrepreneurs working together to tap the potential energy unleashed by the shifting tectonic plates beneath our feet.

This chapter argues that nature belongs to us in common, and that the value produced by nature remains with the commons even after it has been enclosed and that enclosure has been allocated for private use.

This is both an easy and a hard argument to make. It is an easy argument when applied to those forms of nature that remain abundant. After all, few people are willing to argue for the exclusive or private ownership of the sun or the wind, such that others cannot enjoy their benefits (or wrath); or that the value-creating potential of nature – such as photosynthesis, thermodynamics or the hydrological cycle – should be, or can be, privatized. It is clear that these gifts of nature belong to us all, in common.

It is a more difficult argument to make in a context in which access to nature and natural resources is scarcer and commodified. This context is most evident in the market for land, where private rights to property have existed for centuries, and where plots of land are bought and sold on open markets. Although we can agree that the origins of land ownership are found in the commons, there is much land that has already found its way into private hands. It would be difficult (and probably unfair) to bring this land back into the commons. But, even in those areas where we have granted exclusive access to nature, we can still (and should) ask: how much of nature's underlying productive power (and the value it generates) is transferred with a private title to nature?

Consider the question we use to title this chapter: “Who owns the sun?” In many ways, it is an absurd question. No one owns the sun. Or, alternatively, the sun is ours to share. After all, the sun was created in a process that is completely independent of (and prior to!) human influence: no person made or produced the sun. More importantly, the sun is absolutely essential to our survival on the earth: without it we would die. Should the sun fall under private ownership, its owner would have monopoly power over our very existence; we would be forced to pay anything, and everything, for a ray from the sun.

We begin by considering how to manage the markets for land, and its products. These markets are the most established and the most familiar, but probably also the most varied. There are several reasons why the market for land often serves as a point of departure for thinking about how other resource markets should be managed. One reason may be that we all have a relationship to how property in land is bought and sold in the place where we live. Another reason may be because land ownership has played such an important role in the way we think about man-aging nature, individual liberty and the role of government in the Western world. Yet another reason may be that most natural resources are located on, around or under the land – so controlling access to the land often means controlling access to valuable natural resources.

The total amount of available land on the earth (minus Antarctica) is roughly 33.7 billion acres (see Table 4.1). We use the acre here as our measure, as it offers a convenient mental measuring unit, covering roughly the size of a football pitch. We also know that the world population in 2019 was 7.7 billion. If equally divided, then, each person on the globe would enjoy a little more than 4.4 acres of land. Not all this land is equally productive, and much of it cannot be used for agricultural purposes. The World Bank (2021a) estimates that less than 12 billion acres (c. 48 million km2) could be counted as farmland in 2018 – that is, under a third of the total amount of land available.

In other words, farmland is relatively scarce, and global population growth will exacerbate that scarcity. From Figure 1.2 we learned that the world can expect 9.7 billion inhabitants in 2050. Every one of these individuals will need to find food, clothing and shelter from the land. Under optimal conditions, it might be possible to generate the caloric needs of 10 billion people on just 6 billion acres of land – but we also need land to feed animals, produce biofuels, sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, grow timber, cotton and other clothing fibres, and so on.

With this chapter, we shift our parallax. In the preceding chapters we have examined how political authorities have enclosed and allocated access to different types of resources on (or around) their own sovereign territories. Each of these resources has been located on sovereign territory, or in near proximity to that territory – in surrounding coastal waters, immediately above, or below, the sovereign surface. Although the natural resources found in each of these sovereign spaces may produce Natural Dividends, surprisingly few states have been willing or able to secure them for their people.

This chapter considers the challenge of enclosing and allocating access to familiar (and common) resources in the absence of sovereign authority. In short, we begin where the other chapters left off: on managing the resources that remain, after nation states make their sundry claims on the globe. We refer to the global commons, and use that term for the resources that lie beyond sovereign space: outer space, the inner earth, the high seas (and the sea bottom that lies beneath) and Antarctica. These resources resemble the “common goods” (res communes) identified by Hugo Grotius in his seminal (1608) Mare Liberum, as they belong to everyone and to no one.

Our interest in the global commons is threefold. First and foremost, these common areas offer the next frontier for global resource extraction. Because global demand has outstripped our capacity to provide these resources in sovereign political terrain, we now search for them in the global commons. It is the inadequacy of our current supply in these markets that drives our interest and expansion into the global commons: we go there in search of new sources for familiar, but scarce and valuable, resources. In other words, the markets for these resources are familiar; we are simply extending our reach into new, less charted, political terrain.

This interest is most obvious in space, which has become a competitive playground for the world's richest men, jousting for control over the future market for space tourism. But it is also evident in a number of new enterprises that hope to mine asteroids and planets for rare minerals/metals needed on earth; or with the entrepreneurial dreams to launch high-altitude wind turbines (Levitan 2012) or to secure space-based solar power (Financial Times 2021; Frazer-Nash Consultancy 2021).

We are being thrust, full force, into a new world. In response to constant demands for growth, a dwindling supply of natural resources, environmental perils and the threat of climate change, we need to embrace a post-carbon world – or risk serious damage to our planet. Our generation has begun a frantic race to find alternatives for the scarce resources that previous generations have relied upon. In our pursuit of these alternatives, however, we must avoid the pitfalls of the past. This is the motivation for the book in your hands.

The scientific evidence and consensus is clear: we need to quit oil, gas and coal, and do so quickly. We cannot continue as before, and the war in Ukraine has not blunted that consensus. Already in 2015 it was known that we needed to leave “a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of the current coal reserves” in the ground if we hoped to meet the 2°C Paris climate goals (McGlade & Ekins 2015: 187). To replace these important sources of energy, the world is rushing to discover and develop new resources on two very different fronts.

The first front is aimed at renewables. The demand for new renewable energy resources – such as wind, solar, bio-, geothermal and hydro – is proving insatiable, and global investment in this sector has been extraordinary. BloombergNEF estimates that global investments in this energy transition totalled $755 billion in 2021 – a phenomenal increase from the $32 billion invested in 2004 (BloombergNEF 2022). Much of this investment activity has been spurred by the sundry incentives provided by political authorities that are eager to expand access to nature's renewable resources.

The second front seeks non-renewables. Although there are many advantages in transitioning from carbon-based energy (coal, oil, gas) to more renewable sources of energy (fuelled by, e.g., the sun and the wind), we cannot escape our dependence on non-renewable resources. This transition will require millions of tonnes1 of new raw materials to be mined. Batteries depend on cobalt, lithium and nickel; the magnets for electric generators and motors rely on neodymium and other rare earth elements; and the lines that connect the diverse components of the green economy are made mostly from copper.

The previous chapter presented two arguments. First, we argued that nature, before it is commodified, belongs to us in common, and that the value it produces – nature's gift – also belongs to the commons. Second, we argued that significant market value is created by political authority when it encloses, allocates and facilitates the commodification of nature.

This chapter extends that argument by elaborating on how nature's gift and its management regime generate value in the form of various rents, which together constitute a Natural Dividend. Politically challenging it may be, but it is not technically difficult to secure the Natural Dividend: political authorities need only to do two things. First, they must establish a management regime that recognizes that these natural resources belong to the commons and allocates access to these resources on its behalf. This management regime sets the scope and the distribution of access to the resources (and, hence, their potential value). Second, political authorities need to employ a variety of policy instruments that can secure the Natural Dividend for the public good, and ensure it is not taken. This Divided can be secured in either a political or economic form, and each form employs a different set of instruments.

The Natural Dividend is what economists refer to as a resource rent, which is itself derived from the scarcity (both natural and induced) of natural resources. In particular, the Natural Dividend consists of three component rents: a differential rent; a regulatory rent; and a locational rent. We elaborate on the nature of each of these component rents in subsequent chapters, as they tend to vary in importance across resource types: in Chapter 4 we introduce differential rents; in Chapter 5 we introduce regulatory rents; and in Chapter 6 we discuss locational rents.

This chapter explains the nature of resource rents, in general, and how they can be secured by political authorities. To do this, the chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part introduces the general literature on resource rents and the two main ways by which natural resources are made scarce (and valuable): by way of nature and/or regulation. Although nature can produce a differential rent all on its own, political authorities can produce a regulatory and/or locational rent (or some combination of the two) when they regulate or provide access to that nature.

We began this book with a call to action – a call that is propelled by the urgency of our current climate (and nature) crisis. The responses to this call have been manifold and can vary across different timelines. Some analysts have focused on the long run and the need for more radical, systemic changes, such as a complete ban on exploiting non-renewable sources of energy; the rise of degrowth, or “half-earth” alternatives; even the end of capitalism itself (see, e.g., Kallis et al. 2018; Wilson 2018; Sweeney 2020). These sorts of big-ticket questions are exciting to contemplate, but difficult to bring about.

We have set our sights a notch lower and focused on a more immediate (short-term) timeline. Although the contours of these brave new worlds remain undefined and debated, we can and should begin the journey in their direction. We can do this by taking several smaller steps along the path to real change. The best way to do this, we think, is to reconsider our current approaches to managing shared natural resources. This is because it is possible to secure consensus about the desirability of these steps, even if we disagree about the final end state.

This need for a new management approach is propelled by two realizations. First, it is increasingly evident that we need to secure more sustainable sources of food and energy, and doing so will force us to explore and exploit several new resource frontiers. In all likelihood, the future will find us mining the deep-sea ocean bottom, harvesting solar power from outer space and tapping the inner earth. This future may be frightening for many, but it can also offer promise; after all, most of our natural resources remain unexplored and untapped: we have only scratched the surface, literally, of our natural bounty. We find promise in the possibility of opening these new resource frontiers. Doing so offers us an opportunity to rethink our approach to natural resource management, because it introduces a new round of enclosures, in which common wealth will be enclosed, allocated and commodified.

This brings us to the second realization: the most dominant approaches to NRM today have focused mainly on the need to secure economic efficiency.

One of the most exciting and rapidly developing resource markets is the one for renewable energy (RE). This market is remarkably varied and broad, as it draws from a number of competing natural resources and technologies – many of which lie at the heart of the phenomenal transformations taking place across the global energy system. For this reason, the market for RE attracts a great deal of attention from policy-makers, academics and entrepreneurs. The enthusiasm and interest are exciting, but it is also important to place these developments in a larger context: RE still accounts for a remarkably small share of the world's primary energy consumption.

Because these markets are in transition, we can expect our current regulatory focus to change as the resources and technologies mature and become more competitive. Today, most regulatory attention has been aimed at supporting infant technologies and markets, so that they can better compete with more traditional (dirty and non-renewable) forms of energy.

The contemporary market for RE is dominated by three natural resources (water, wind and solar) and several underlying technologies (e.g. turbines, photovoltaic [PV] devices, concentrated solar power [CSP] furnaces, etc.). Globally, RE resources were able to generate an impressive 2,537 gigawatts (GW) in 2020 (International Renewable Energy Agency [IRENA] 2020: 1). As shown in Figure 6.1, hydropower (at 1,190 GW) makes up almost half the existing RE capacity in the world today, while the other half – roughly – comes from wind and solar energy.

Here we focus on the energy produced by the wind and the sun. There are three reasons for this particular focus. First, and foremost: wind and solar energy are remarkably special and attractive. These unique traits are elaborated upon in the section that follows, but for now we can note that these resources are ubiquitous, apparently free for the taking, clean (pollution-free) and renewable. For all these reasons, there has been a significant effort by political authorities to stimulate the production of wind and solar energy – i.e. to shift consumption from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy.

This effort has been propelled by a number of national and international initiatives. Indeed, by the end of 2020 nearly every single country in the world had some form of renewable energy support policy, albeit at varying level of ambition and effectiveness (REN21 2021

: 18).

In the early years of European integration, there was a broad recognition of the need to integrate economies in a way that allowed policymakers to stabilize their home markets. As we saw in Chapter 4, this was done to ensure that market integration didn't drive labour conditions and wages downward in a competitive race to the bottom. Over the decades, this lesson has been lost on policymakers, as member states have jettisoned many of the tools necessary for local economic stabilization.

Today, European integration is animated by a belief that bigger markets are better than smaller ones; that integration propels harmonization; and that markets can be self-correcting. Policymakers and academics have come to believe that socioeconomic imbalances across Europe's various regions and countries can (and will) adjust automatically on their own accord. This belief lies implicitly behind the pursuit of a common currency and the need for standardized (read common) rules for member state fiscal, regulatory and procurement policies (among others). Such efforts have been justified by reference to the needs of a level playing field and with the promise of increased efficiencies. As a result of these pursuits, however, there is less room remaining for local policy autonomy at the member state level.

The problem is that European labour markets remain remarkably segregated and unique. The goal of this chapter is to describe that heterogeneity. The continued existence of a multitude of local labour markets – each following their own economic path – remains a significant challenge for Europe.

In the absence of unique policy instruments that can address these local challenges, such local economic asymmetries can prove very costly. If European labour markets actually behaved in a similar manner, and actually shared similar ambitions/hopes, then it would make sense to share a unified (single) policy regime (whether it was monetary, fiscal, regulatory, whatever). But this chapter demonstrates that this is absolutely not the case. Europe is not one common labour market, but hundreds – perhaps thousands – of small, unique and local labour markets, many of which are heading in very different directions.

This chapter considers the effect of market integration on organized labour in Europe. To the extent that workaway and competitive wage pressure have become a more important means for securing local labour market adjustments, they are bound to affect the relative power of labour. This chapter considers the impact of these changes on the power and influence of workers as a class, and how organized labour in Europe has responded to these changes.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, it is common to measure labour power along two dimensions: in terms of both structural and associational power. Most of this book has aimed to describe how changes in European markets have undermined the structural power of labour. In the preceding chapters, we have seen how many instruments have been removed from the policymakers’ toolbox, leaving national authorities with less capacity to manage their local labour markets. Member states have jettisoned their monetary and regulatory policies, and their fiscal policies have been severely constrained by the needs of a monetary union (Chapter 6). The resulting policy void has not been filled by a suitable common budget or social policy at the European level (Chapter 7). Finally, European factor flows (Chapter 8) have proven entirely inadequate for the job: capital flows tend to make things worse, not better, and the scope of labour flows across Europe is entirely insufficient (and for good reasons). The result of these changes can be seen in a significant decrease in the structural power of labour, as evident in high levels of unemployment, low wages, increased workaway, dwindling social service protections and other indicators.

These changes have also necessitated increased competition among European labour markets. While the motivation behind these reforms may not have been to undermine the power of labour, this has clearly been the effect. In the same way that unorganized labour bids against unionized labour to secure scarce job offers, workers in Europe are now locked in a competitive wage struggle, where each local labour market has an incentive to underbid the others in a race to the bottom. European policymakers explicitly advocate wage flexibility as the key to economic (competitive) survival and this tends to increase the vulnerability (and commodification) of European workers. As Clauwaert and Schomann (2012: 17) have suggested, the EU seems to see quality employment (and pay) as being incompatible with competitiveness.