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.

Why negotiations and the IPCC are unlikely to make sure we’ll be safe

"It is astounding to realise that the international community has failed 20 times to sufficiently address climate change. For how long do we have to keep telling ourselves that it all will be different this time around?" asks Erik-Jan Van Oosten. He explores the reasons why the current negotiation process is unlikely to succeed before going on to propose a Plan B: CapGlobalCarbon.

Cap & Share in the run-up to Paris

Is it realistic to insist, as Feasta climate group members are doing, that world citizens could set up a global trust that would issue fossil fuel extraction permits , thus ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions gradually reduce to zero? What about politics? Cartel pressure and greed? And how can we get the word out about Cap & Share in the first place? Laurence Matthews makes some practical suggestions.

Update on the “Sink or Sue” climate litigation project

Here's an update by David Knight on the Feasta climate group's plan to organize a mock trial next year, in partnership with a large group of allies, many of whom already have legal experience relating to climate change. The mock trial will be an initial step towards a real court action and would develop and test a claim against a fictitious British Fossil fuel company for contributing to the damage caused by climate change.

Lessons learnt from the not-so-radical Tyndall emissions conference

Several Feasta climate group members attended the Tyndall Radical Emissions Reduction conference in December 2013. Three of them - Nick Bardsley, Brian Davey and Laurence Matthews - have shared their reactions to the way the conference was organised. You can also download posters that were displayed at the conference by John Jopling, Nick Bardsley and Brian Davey.

“Fresh approaches to tackling climate change” FEASTA climate group workshop

Governments aren't tackling the climate crisis - so what can be done? That is the question that Feasta climate group members sought to answer in two cutting edge workshops in Winchester at the end of June. Uniquely, the two day workshop brought together lawyers, social scientists, ecological economists and climate change activists who were briefed on the science of sea level rise and extreme weather events by two leading climate scientists.