Natural wealth — oil, minerals, land, water, seabed, spectrum, wind — was not created by any company, government or generation now living. The value drawn from it is not private income. It is the common inheritance of everyone, including those not yet born.
"Extraction is a service that may be paid for. The resource itself was never anyone's to sell."
Every industry that draws wealth from nature combines two entirely different things, and treats them as one. The first is genuine human contribution: the engineering, the labour, the capital at risk, the transport, the refining, the innovation. That work is real, it is difficult, and it deserves payment and a reasonable return.
The second is the resource itself — the oil in the ground, the ore in the rock, the value that appears in land simply because a city grew around it. Nobody now living made these things. They were inherited. Yet our legal systems allow whoever holds the extraction right to capture the value of the resource as though they had created it.
This is the core of the doctrine United Commons calls Common Inheritance. It is not a proposal for higher taxes. It is a different theory of what can be owned in the first place.
Engineering, exploration, drilling, mining, processing, transport, refining, and the technological innovation that makes all of it possible. This is genuine human contribution. Those who perform it — companies, workers, and investors who take real risk — are entitled to revenue and a reasonable commercial return.
The oil, gas, minerals, seabed, water, land-value uplift, wind, tidal and spectrum rights that exist independently of any human effort. No living person created them and no past generation had the authority to sell every future generation's share. This portion — the resource rent — belongs equally to all.
Common Inheritance is not a novelty invented for a campaign. It descends from a recognised tradition in political economy, and it already works in practice in more than one country. That pedigree is the doctrine's foundation.
In Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that the earth is the common property of the human race, and that those who hold it owe the rest a ground-rent — paid as a citizen's dividend. The philosophical root of a resource dividend is more than two centuries old.
In Progress and Poverty, George showed that the value of land arises from the community around it, not the owner, and therefore belongs to the community. His argument became one of the most widely read economic works of its century.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund holds over a trillion dollars of oil rent in permanent public trust. Alaska pays every resident an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund. Common Inheritance is not theoretical — it is operating at national scale right now.
Consider a single, well-documented example: the two largest British-listed oil companies, Shell and BP, across roughly 117 to 119 years of operation. Their combined lifetime profit is not published as a continuous figure — accounting standards, currencies and corporate structures have all changed — so any total is necessarily an estimate built from available annual reports and historical records.
On that basis, a reasonable estimate of their combined lifetime profit is on the order of one trillion US dollars in nominal terms, or very roughly $1.7–2.2 trillion expressed in today's money. Two companies. One resource none of us created.
These are directional estimates, not audited totals. They are assembled from published recent-decade earnings extended backward across earlier decades where continuous records do not exist, then adjusted for inflation. They should be read as an illustration of order of magnitude, not a precise accounting.
We deliberately restrict the illustration to two named companies with public accounts. Much larger figures are sometimes quoted for the entire global oil and gas sector across all producers and state actors; we do not rely on those here, because they cannot be sourced with the same confidence.
Even confined to two firms, the point stands. The question Common Inheritance asks is not whether the work was valuable — it was. The question is what share of that trillion dollars represented payment for work, and what share was simply the capture of a resource that belonged to everyone.
Suppose the resource-rent portion of extraction had been preserved as permanent common capital, rather than consumed or privatised. A permanent fund is not spent — it is invested, and only its real return is drawn, so that the principal endures for every future generation. The illustration below applies a conservative 3% real return to different shares of a $2 trillion lifetime pool.
| Share preserved as common capital | Permanent fund | Annual yield at 3% |
|---|---|---|
| 10% | $200bn | $6bn / year |
| 25% | $500bn | $15bn / year |
| 50% | $1.0tn | $30bn / year |
These figures scale a hypothetical share of the two-company estimate above. They are meant to show the shape of the argument — that even a minority public share, preserved rather than spent, produces a permanent income stream — not to forecast a specific policy outcome. The real global resource base is far larger than two companies, and so, correspondingly, is the opportunity.
Ordinary taxation makes a concession before it begins. It says: the wealth is yours, and the state will take a portion afterwards. That framing accepts private ownership of the whole and then argues about the size of the slice.
Common Inheritance makes a different claim entirely. It says the natural-resource portion was never exclusively private in the first place. The public is not asking for a share of someone else's income — it is asking for the income from something it already owns.
This distinction matters practically as well as philosophically. It means a resource dividend is not confiscation, charity, or class politics. It is the payment of rent to the rightful owners — every citizen, equally, as an inheritor of a world none of them made.
The doctrine only matters if it can be built. United Commons proposes a custodian — the Commons Trust — that holds natural-resource rights on behalf of present and future generations. The Trust does not run every industry. Companies, cooperatives and public bodies still compete to do the work. What changes is ownership of the resource base itself.
The obvious objection is that a body holding a trillion dollars is exactly the kind of thing that gets captured. The answer is in the Trust's constitution, not in trusting its officers. The Commons Trust has no shareholders and no owner; its members are the citizens themselves, each holding one equal, non-transferable share. It cannot sell or borrow against the resource base. Its accounts, contracts and licences are public by law. Its custodians are bound by the same anti-capture safeguards that govern the rest of United Commons — one person, one vote, hard limits on concentrated control, and no disposal of common assets without a binding public referendum. A custodian who conceals, undervalues, or corruptly licenses is criminally liable. The Trust holds; it does not own — and it is built so that it cannot quietly become the power it was created to prevent.
Natural-resource rights are held permanently in trust — never sold, never privatised, never usable as collateral for routine government borrowing.
Extraction and operating rights are awarded by open, transparent tender. Enterprise is preserved; perpetual ownership of the resource is not transferred.
Operators recover their costs and earn a reasonable commercial return. Workers are paid. Producing regions are compensated. Environmental damage is charged in full.
What remains — the value of the resource itself — enters a permanent Commons Reserve, constitutionally separate from the government of the day.
Each person owns an equal, non-transferable beneficial interest in the Reserve. One person, one share. It cannot be bought, sold, or concentrated.
Revenue must not simply vanish into ordinary spending — that would replace corporate capture with political capture. The Reserve is constitutionally separate. A government may administer it, but may not own it, sell it, or spend the principal without direct democratic authority. The allocation below is illustrative; the shares are for citizens to decide. The constitutional principle is what stays fixed.
Invested in perpetuity. Only the real return is ever drawn, so the inheritance endures for generations not yet born.
Paid directly and equally to every citizen — the tangible form of shared ownership, in the tradition of Paine and Alaska.
Investment in the shared foundations of a decent society and the shift to clean energy.
Compensation and investment for affected communities, plus the full cost of environmental restoration, auditing and administration.
Fossil fuels are the historical proof, but the pattern is not confined to them. The same enclosure is happening again — with renewable-energy sites, national grids, publicly generated data, artificial intelligence trained on the whole of collective human knowledge, radio spectrum, orbital capacity, genetic resources, and the rise in urban land values that public investment creates.
In each case the danger is identical: a common inheritance or a collective body of knowledge enters privately controlled systems, and society is then required to buy access back from the new owners. The oil story is a warning about what happens when we fail to make the distinction in time.
This does not prohibit profitable enterprise. It prevents private contribution from being used to claim permanent ownership over the common foundation everyone stands on.
Common Inheritance need not wait for global constitutional change. The Energy Commons pilot is the doctrine made tangible: members collectively finance renewable generation, the productive assets are held permanently in trust, households receive energy at cost, and surplus enters a member-owned reserve. Ownership cannot later be sold to an energy company without a binding member referendum.
People would not merely read that resources should be held in common. They would receive cheaper energy, transparent accounts, and a visible stake in something that cannot be taken from them.
Money may build companies. It must not buy the direction of society — nor the inheritance of everyone who comes after.
United Commons exists to draw one line clearly: enterprise may own what it creates, but nature is the common inheritance of everyone, including those not yet born.