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.

Cap and Share to be analysed for Comhar

Comhar, the Irish National Sustainability Council, has contracted AEA Energy and Environment, a major British consultancy, to analyse Feasta’s Cap and Share concept as a tool to control Ireland’s road transport emissions. The policy analysis part of the report should be completed by the end of February and, if the verdict is favourable, another consultancy, Cambridge Econometrics, will be given a contract to use its E3ME model to explore the effects that this use of C&S would have on the Irish economy in comparison with using a carbon tax or fuel excise duty to achieve the same result. Both studies …

Memorandum to the Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry into Personal Carbon Allowances

The Environmental Audit Commission of the United Kingdom Parliament is investigating the feasibility of introducing Personal Carbon Allowances to control greenhouse gas emissions. Feasta member Laurence Matthews was invited by the EAC to supply information about Cap and Share, and the text of the submission can be downloaded here.…

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.…