A commons-centered methodology for innovation prevents global plunder. Tech advances under the aff would only be funded if they didn’t have negative spillovers on other commons.

These property rights are justified on the basis that creation and innovation will take place only if those doing this work are adequately protected from free riders—those who would prematurely take and profit from others’ work.10 But there are concerns that developments in IP protection are going well beyond adequate protection for creators toward absolute protection. More and more time, energy, and money are being spent establishing and enforcing IP and less and less on innovating and creating. In addition, more and more “downstream” creators are being stymied and deterred by the thicket of protection.11 Overall, this means that society is paying the cost of IP—in terms of both the costs of the creations we have and the cost of forgone creations.12 How do we account for the fact that many creations of the mind build on an existing intellectual commons, on what many minds over time have produced? Musicians from folk artists like Woody Guthrie to hip-hop artists like DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) explicitly acknowledge that their music is possible only because of the contributions of earlier musicians.13 The risk with overly protective IP protection is that it hides the debt that all creators owe to the contributions of others in their field—to their commons. Others share these concerns, and, particularly in the area of information technology, there is a flourishing of experiments with privateproperty and open-access resources that prioritize the relationships between people over our relationships to things and, in the process, build new online communities. Initiatives include the Creative Commons, open-source software (like Linux and Firefox), and free software (like GNU) and its associated innovations, General Public License and Copyleft. Far from losing out, businesses are finding that open-access collaborative design practices can increase their market share and ensure loyalty and vibrant innovation.14 If our love affair with technology has given rise to open-access commons, it is a love affair that is also eroding our commons. So much of the technology that we take for granted today relies on our planet’s nonrenewable resources—whether resources in the component parts of our technological devices or those used to power the production and operation of these devices. Currently we seem willing to trade our coastlines and our weather systems for patterns of development and growth that rely on burning nonrenewable fossil fuels. Can the practice of commoning be applied to climate change as a way of taking back the economy and contributing to, rather than undermining, our planet’s survival? We know that our climate has been warming since the 1860s (for six generations).15 As an earth community we are shitting in the nest, to use a common expression, and largely failing to care for our most precious commons. How we have mistreated our atmosphere is a global tragedy of an unmanaged open-access resource. There are, however, glimmers of hope that this neglect will not continue. Over the past two generations at least, people have been involved in commoning the atmosphere by arguing for protocols of behavior that maintain and replenish its life-giving properties. This action has often been prompted by scientific discoveries about the complex systems that make up our atmosphere, including the mix of life-giving and lifedestroying gases and liquids produced on earth. Take, for example, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which were invented in 1920 and became widely used in air conditioners, refrigerators, and aerosols until their use was banned in minority-world countries from take back property 145 1996 and in majority-world countries from 2010. As a global community we have decided to cease production of the CFCs that have thinned the ozone layers of the stratosphere, allowing damaging rays to reach earth and cause cancer.16 But, as we show on the Ozone Commons Yardstick, it will not be until 2070 at the earliest—that is, two generations from now!—that the ozone hole will be repaired and we will not need to be so protective of the skin of future children or quite so worried. Clearly we cannot know what the future will hold, but we can try to make assessments based on the scenarios offered by scientists who work on climate change. Many vocal commentators are convinced that humans need not worry about global warming, that our inventiveness has, in the past, overcome grave challenges like global oil and food shortages and the threat of millennium bugs and nuclear winters. Some say that the newest threats (if indeed real) will surely be overcome by whiz-bang technological fixes—nuclear power or geoengineering of ocean and atmospheric conditions. Invariably, when these types of technosolutions are put forward, the agenda is to find ways for “business as usual” to continue. The focus of attention too often shifts to the efficacy of the various fixes, and we lose an opportunity to reflect on whether the planet can sustain business as usual or how fixes in one area will inevitably flow on to other commons. With our Commons Yardstick in mind, perhaps we can more clearly identify the issues and time frames that confront us. On the Atmospheric Commons Yardstick we identify the 1860s as the period from which average temperatures have been rising several degrees Fahrenheit. It was not until the 1950s that scientists started to systematically study global warming (helped by increased U.S. government funding in the sciences because of the cold war). Even though the scientific evidence was mounting, it was almost two generations later, in 1997, that the Kyoto Protocol was signed by most minority-world governments, agreeing to reduce 146 take back property greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels for the period 2008–2012. Ten years after that, in 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for their efforts in generating and disseminating knowledge about humaninduced climate change.