Just caught this report of ‘Cap and Share’ on Current Climate Issues . The author’s definition of Cap and Share is a tad different from our own Feasta design but thankfully, retains some essential traits. Sigh… you carry them inside you for months, you give painful birth, you nurture and care for them for years – and then they go off and do their own thing!…
….Climate change calls for all states to introspect and redefine their priorities. For the developed and other Annex 1 countries where population growth is at zero 0% per annum or negative, it is easy to adopt a no growth economic policy. The only trade they need to engage in is benign no-growth-no-profit-no-loss trade in renewable energy and science and technology support in areas like prevention of desertification and biodiversity conservation. For developing countries with still growing populations, economic growth in the context of climate change will have to be promoted through the four elements they have asserted in the Convention as important for their development: mitigation in developed ocuntries to give developing countires space; financing for new technology, financing for science and research, and financing for adaptation. The developed and other Annex 1 countries are obliged under the Convention to provide these moneys. This is not aid. It is repayment of a global debt after two centuries of ecological devastation wraught by those who believed in the industrial model of development based on colonial exploitation. The ecological taxation system through which developed countries and other Annex 1 countries can raise this money is called cap and share, a version of cap and trade. The government auctions decreasing numbers of permits to the polluters in their territory every year. It retains the quantum of money its population is due, on the basis of the percentage of global population in its country. Thus for example the UK retains 0.75% of the “pot of gold” and passes the rest to the Adaptation Fund, the democratically controlled Fund established by the Convention for just this purpose. This will be a shock to President Obama. He has just budgeted 646 billion income from cap and trade for the period 2012 to 2019 for the USA. But equity dictates that the USA retain only the percentage due to them on the basis of the percentage of their population. Thus the USA retains 3.75% of the pot of gold the administration raises from the polluters in the USA and passes the rest to the Convention Adaptation Fund for equal distribution amongst developing countries on the basis of their population. In this way they will comply with their commitments to MITIGATE, FINANCE the incremental cost of new TECHNOLOGY, finance the full cost of ADAPTATION, and finance the full cost of research and science and reporting under the Convention. The full text of India’s position paper can be downloaded from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/node/267995…
