A NOVEL way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that could relieve the threat of a global depression posed by high oil prices, as well as easing the climate crisis, has been put forward by Feasta, the Dublin-based think tank.
Feasta, an acronym in Irish for the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, has published a discussion document suggesting that all greenhouse gas emissions should be capped at their present level and then reduced rapidly year by year.
Under the "cap and share" proposal, every adult would receive a certificate entitling them to a personal share of each year's capped emissions and could sell their certificates to banks which, in turn, would sell them on to oil, gas and coal companies.
These companies would be required to buy enough certificates to cover the emissions from the fuels they produce.
However, because the certificates would be in short supply, the excess profits that the fuel producers are making would be shared by everyone.
"Essentially, it shares out the benefits that the world gets from the limited amount of fossil fuel it can permit itself to use until there's no longer a threat of a runaway climate change", according to Feasta's Emer Ó Siochrú, who helped to develop the proposal.
She added that "cap and share" was gaining more support than a carbon tax.
Richard Douthwaite, Feasta's leading economist, said the Government was taking it seriously. He added that Comhar, the national sustainability council, had just produced a report scoring "cap and trade" higher in terms of its ability to cut emissions.
The Comhar report, drawn up by British consultants AEA Energy and Environment, recommends that "cap and share" should be used initially to control road transport emissions and then extended to the other sectors not covered by the EU emissions trading regime.
As a result, Comhar has commissioned a further report from another consultancy, Cambridge Econometrics, to compare the effects of using "cap and trade" to reduce emissions by up to 30 per cent by 2020 with those of using a carbon tax to do the same job.
Noting that energy prices were already high, Mr Douthwaite said measures such as carbon taxes would make them higher still - and this is one of the problems facing officials meeting in Bonn this week to prepare for the next UN climate summit in December.
"Senior officials from more than 160 countries face the difficulty that many measures - including carbon taxes and emissions trading - deliberately raise energy costs by penalising carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels," according to a Reuters report.
"They are controversial options as record oil prices hit motorists and electricity consumers worldwide. Meanwhile, carbon-cutting biofuels have helped drive up food prices by using food crops to make an ethanol alternative to gasoline."
Mr Douthwaite said "cap and share" would solve these price-rise problems.
"Because the atmosphere is a common resource belonging to all humankind, Feasta believes that everyone on Earth should benefit equally from its use as an emissions dump."
