Cap and Share

FEASTA’s Climate Group promotes Cap and Share as a way of eliminating fossil fuel production, an alternative to carbon taxes that rely solely on price as the principal way to reduce emissions. It has two basic premises: firstly, that to stop runaway climate change, we need to cap, or limit, our carbon emissions at the source of extraction or import, and secondly, that any money generated by the sale of permits for extracting or importing fossil fuels should be shared equally by the population.

In August 2023 a new, global Cap and Share Climate Alliance was launched by a group of partner organisations including Feasta, Equal Right, The Future We Need, DR Climate Change Network, Autonomy, Global Redistribution Advocates and the Abel Musumali Foundation. If you’d like to find out more about the Alliance or if your organisation is interested in joining, please go here.

Cap and Share was mentioned in the 2022 IPCC II Working Group report on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability (Chapter 1, p67), in the context of climate mitigation measures that do not assume a need for continual economic growth and that seek to minimise reliance on as-yet-undiscovered negative emissions technologies.

Cap and Share has its own dedicated website here. A sister website for the CapGlobalCarbon initiative, which places Cap and Share in a global context, is at www.capglobalcarbon.org.

Cap and Share is the focus of our publication Sharing for Survival: Restoring the Climate, the Commons and Society, which includes chapters on the commons, policy packages that would be needed alongside Cap and Share, the logistics of managing the share on a global level and how governance could be handled.

Below you’ll find an archive of Feasta blog articles and Feasta submissions that include Cap and Share.

Using Cap and Share to control transport emissions – Richard Douthwaite

Richard Douthwaite made a presentation to the ‘Emissions trading and road transport sector’ conference on 1 May at the Energy Institute in London. Similar presentations have been made to Comhar, the Irish National Sustainability Council and to the Senior Managers’ Forum of the Irish Department of Transport.

A copy of the PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here.…

Using Cap and Share to control emissions from the EU transport sector

The Feasta climate group has participated in the current review of the workings of the EU’s emissions trading system by proposing that all Europe’s transport emissions should be capped and tradable permits for the tonnage of carbon dioxide involved distributed each year to every adult EU resident. The Executive Summary is included below, or download the full document.…

Emissions Rationing and the Oil Price Crisis

This briefing paper examines a way in which the poor in many countries could be protected if, as oil and gas get scarcer, their cost goes higher and higher over the years ahead.

The content of this briefing paper is included below, or download the original document.
This document is an updated version of a November 2005 document. …

Submission of Evidence to the ERFA Committee’s examination of international climate policy post-2012

PDF version of this submission

Executive Summary

  • There is an urgent need for climate action but the UNFCCC process is moving at a snail’s pace. It has become a Gordian Knot of complexity. A simpler process could cut through the knot and lead to a climate treaty being achieved in a relatively short period.
  • The overall goals of the process need to be established. If these can be kept simple, it is much easier for competing schemes to be compared and for existing schemes such as the EU ETS to be used to achieve them.
  • Simple schemes are also the
…

Press Release: Feasta’s response to EU aviation proposals

Wednesday, 20th December 2006
Download a PDF version of this Press Release.

EU aviation proposals “distort competition between all forms of transport, hand windfall  profits to airlines rather than citizens, and do not provide a model for the overall reform of the EU ETS.”

Feasta suggests alternative approach…