What should the Irish government do about carbon pricing?
The Irish government is seriously considering a 'fee-and-dividend'/'carbon cheques' system for its proposed carbon tax. Is this advisable?
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.
Climate dividends and the yellow vests
"Climate dividends, which return money from a carbon price back to people, provides a direct solution to the yellow vests' concerns, while putting income inequality on equal footing with climate concerns," argues Mike Sandler.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the IPCC 1.5 degree report and the Nobel to Nordhaus
"We should celebrate the positives from those news stories in raising general awareness. But for those who recognize the bad and ugly parts of those news stories, we must turn the resulting feeling of powerlessness into a political movement to form a Global Climate Trust and implement Cap Global Carbon," writes Mike Sandler.
Submission to the European Commission on a strategy for long-term greenhouse gas reductions
In this submission we argue that the EC's overall goals need to be re-examined if it is truly to eliminate greenhouse gases. The focus now needs to be on wellbeing, not on growth.
First steps towards CapGlobalCarbon: potential partner countries and useful programmes
This is a brief overview of research carried out by CapGlobalCarbon intern Paul Faisant over the summer of 2018, in which he explored the idea of the EU forming a partnership with a group of Asian countries so as to completely eliminate the production and import of fossil fuels on all of their territories, while also reducing poverty and inequality.
Cap and Dividend bill introduced in U.S. Senate – a ray of hope regardless of its “political feasibility”
"For those watching U.S. politics from afar, it may seem like the country is filled with climate deniers and oil drillers. But there was a bright spot recently for those of us in the US who continue to work for climate stability and sanity," writes Mike Sandler.
