Press coverage of Cap & Share
On this page:
"Time to raise our game: 19 ways to make the UK more sustainable"
Press Release, Sustainable Development Commission, 1 July 2009
"Cap & Return"
Editorial, Washington Post, 19 October 2008
"Why I was wrong about rationing"
Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 29 May 2008
"If the cap fits, share it"
Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 31 January 2008
"Sharing out the rations"
Richard Douthwaite, Irish Times, 13 Jan 2007
"Radical overhaul of emissions allocation required"
Richard Douthwaite, Irish Times, 28 Nov 2005
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Press Release from the Sustainable Development Commission, 1 July 2009
"Time to raise our game: 19 ways to make the UK more sustainable
Sustainable Development Commission unveils its Breakthroughs for the 21st Century at London event with Anna Ford, Jonathan Dimbleby and Rosie Boycott
Cap and Share, Algae, Incredible Edible Communities, and the Royal Bank of Sustainability praised as potential Breakthroughs
HRH the Prince of Wales makes special visit to meet the teams behind the ideas
The Sustainable Development Commission will today (1 July 2009) unveil 19 Breakthrough ideas which could transform the UK into a sustainable society, at an event attended by HRH the Prince of Wales.
The SDC's Breakthroughs for the 21st Century project sets out to identify the ideas which could make the biggest impact on Britain's efforts to tackle climate change, resource depletion and inequality. Almost 300 ideas were submitted by the public, businesses, academics, and sustainability professionals of which 19 were selected by SDC Commissioners as potential Breakthroughs.
The 19 individuals and groups behind the final selection will showcase their ideas at today's conference, hosted by Anna Ford, Jonathan Dimbleby and Rosie Boycott, where they will be paid a special visit by HRH the Prince of Wales. 400 high-level community, business, public service and Government representatives will be present to discuss how to make the ideas a national reality.
Among the 19 final ideas selected as representing potential Breakthroughs are:
Incredible Edible Communities - a project pioneered in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, to increase the amount of local food grown and eaten within the community
The Royal Bank of Sustainability - Transforming the bank most closely associated with the oil and gas industry - now publicly owned - into one which invest in projects to halt the effects of climate change
Algae and carbon capture - using fast-growing algae to absorb the CO2 given off by the industrial burning of fossil fuels
Outdoor experiences for all children in the UK - reversing the trend of children growing up with no access to the natural environment, to increase their health, confidence and well-being, and their understanding of the relationship between their choices and the world around them
Making cycling mainstream - Making the bike the normal choice for journeys of up to five miles
Cap and Share - Suppliers of fossil fuels to buy permits for their greenhouse gas emissions before selling the fuel, with the proceeds shared between all citizens, who have the choice of whether or not to sell their permits
Mobilising collective action - scaling up the active networks and organisations for change blossoming around the UK, including the Transition Towns network, Green Voice, and South London's Project Dirt
From 'Pre-Pay' to 'Pay-As-You-Save' - Financing home energy efficiency measures through an innovative system where householders pay for improvements through consequent energy savings
SDC Chair Jonathon Porritt said:
"Progress on sustainable development, at the national level, has been slow. Yet all over the country, there are people taking action to make their own communities more sustainable, driving forward technological innovations, and pushing the policy agenda with really big ideas.
"Some of the Breakthrough ideas we've selected represent cutting-edge innovation and imagination; others are familiar but powerful ideas whose time has come. We wanted to celebrate the hard work behind these ideas, and start a bigger conversation about how the UK can best take these - and a host of other great ideas - forward. We've been talking about it for long enough. What we've got to do now is make it happen".
The report Breakthroughs for the 21st Century is available to download on the SDC's website at www.sd-commission.org.uk.
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Washington Post calls for Cap & Return
This editorial article is from the Washington Post for Sunday, October 19, 2008; Page B06. Cap & Return is the same as Cap & Dividend.
Cap and Return
Fight the recession or fight global warming? Congress can do both.
There are two powerful and opposing economic forces buffeting the American people that could undermine efforts to address global warming. Oil prices are the lowest they've been since June 2007. This good news at the pump may spell trouble for the environment if drivers return to the roads and reverse months of stunning reductions in gas consumption. Meanwhile, the looming recession will lessen the political will in Washington to pursue policies that would add costs to doing business or take money out of the thin wallets of consumers.
Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) have committed to putting a price on carbon-burning fuels such as oil and coal through a cap-and-trade system of declining emissions allowances that would be auctioned off to polluters. We agree with Mr. Obama's plan to auction 100 percent of the allowances to reach the goal of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050. But how to accomplish this without exacerbating the recession? No problem. Return to the American people every penny of the trillions of dollars expected to be generated by these sales.
This is not a radical notion. In Canada, British Columbia already does what we are proposing. An economy-wide carbon tax was imposed in the province in July. The $1. 85 billion in Canadian dollars that it is expected to generate over the next three years will go back to the population in the form of reduced tax rates for all residents, corporations and small businesses. A climate action credit will be distributed to the poor to help with rising energy costs.
While the climate change bill passed by the Senate this year and the "discussion draft" released by Reps. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) this month provide relief for low-income families, the measures split most of the potential proceeds among various funds intended to spark innovation and spur development of alternative energy that will one day lessen the dependence on fossil fuels. Even in the best of times, we would worry that this gets government into the business of picking winners (and succumbing to legions of special pleaders) when it should get out of the way and let price trigger the technological efficiencies that business will assuredly develop and invest in to meet or exceed the carbon caps. Giving the money directly to the American people has the virtue of being transparent.
At a time of impending fiscal constraints, the temptation to pull back from pressing environmental goals is high. But taking on climate change and facing down the recession is not an either-or proposition. With global warming happening more quickly than scientists predicted, Earth can't wait.
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"Why I was wrong about rationing"
Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 29 May 2008
A far simpler way to constrain carbon is to deal "upstream" with the few dozen companies that produce or import fossil fuels, rather than hitting tens of millions of consumers.
I should start with an apology. In October 2006 I wrote an article for the New Statesman strongly advocating carbon rationing as the only appropriate response to the emergency of climate change. So you might expect me to be furious that the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, has shelved a suggested rationing scheme following a lukewarm government feasibility study. But I believe Benn has taken the right decision. Rationing now seems to me both unnecessary and possibly counterproductive.
It sounds like an attractively egalitarian way to distribute a limited resource. That is why it worked in the Second World War. But carbon is not a necessity like food or water. While we are aiming for a zero-carbon society, it would never make much sense to aim for a zero-food society. Carbon is simply a euphemism for energy, and fossil-fuel energy can be substituted by that from cleaner sources, or consumption reduced.
Hence the proposal to make personal carbon allowances tradable. If someone is carbon-thrifty, goes the logic (perhaps they holiday in Cornwall rather than Cannes), they can sell their unused ration to someone who wants more. That gives people a financial incentive to be more climate-friendly. It sounds simple, but actually involves some pretty complicated financial reasoning. At what point should you sell your unused ration? Carbon prices will doubtless fluctuate, like prices in any tradable commodity. Might you get more for your carbon buck in six months' time? Would you be better off flogging the lot the moment it comes through the door, and then buying carbon on the spot market the next time you fill your petrol tank? I can't see most ordinary people - most of whom wouldn't dream of speculating on currency exchanges or the commo dities markets - understanding how to play the system. And that means they are likely to lose out or get ripped off. It also means that people would not be getting the correct price signal to encourage them to change their behaviour.
What "tradable allowances" actually means is setting up a parallel currency in carbon. The government or the private sector would need to establish 50 million carbon accounts (one for every adult), and monitor withdrawals and additions as people bought fuel at petrol stations or paid heating bills. The study by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggests that the scheme would cost between £700m and £2bn to set up, and between £1bn and £2bn a year to run, mainly for this reason. Yet this expense is already largely unnecessary: electricity is covered at company level by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (energy firms have to buy carbon credits to cover their production), and aviation is due to come under the ETS within the next few years. Moreover, even strong rationing proponents shy away from suggesting that every consumer item - from washing-up liquid to bananas - should carry simultaneous sterling and carbon prices: calculating the latter would be almost impossibly complicated. So, the only bits left over are road transport and domestic oil and gas consumption. Hardly an argument for establishing a hugely complicated parallel currency.
So, is there a better solution? Yes: the system we already use to ration our consumption - the price mechanism. A far simpler way to constrain carbon is to deal "upstream" with the few dozen companies that produce or import fossil fuels, rather than "downstream" with tens of millions of consumers. Companies drilling, mining or importing carbon into the domestic economy would have to buy tradable quotas to cover the emissions from their products. The rest of us simply find fossil fuels becoming more expensive and change our behaviour accordingly. The financial incentive is the same as with rationing, but we don't have to become experts in trading.
The remaining question involves equity: more expensive fuels make some people, primarily the poor, worse off; hence the egalitarianism of rationing. True, but it is what happens to the money that counts. If revenue raised from auctioning carbon quotas to companies is targeted at those who most need it, perhaps through the tax and benefits system, then a progressive outcome can still be achieved. I hate to admit it - but in abandoning carbon rationing, the government, for once, has got it right.
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"If the cap fits, share it"
Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 31 January 2008
Instead of setting up a new currency in carbon, cap and share utilises the oldest rationing system in the book: the price mechanism.
It is strange how little British people know about what goes on in Ireland. The Irish government is just a few months away from introducing a scheme to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions which is revolutionary in its ambition and scope, and could be extraordinarily important as a model for the rest of the world. Yet no one here has heard anything about it. A search I conducted on a news database returned a grand total of zero documents.
Ireland's energy and environment ministers are both Greens, governing in coalition with the more traditional Fianna Fáil party. The Green Party's condition for entering the coalition was a climate-change bill - imported, as is often the custom, from the UK. This bill will be passed soon but, like us, Ireland at present has no coherent programme for actually getting the cuts in carbon emissions that the new legislation will mandate. Except that now the Irish may have invented just the tool for the job. It is called "cap and share". Remember the phrase - you could soon be hearing much more about it.
In previous issues of this magazine, I have argued strongly in favour of carbon rationing, under which every adult citizen would get a share of the country's carbon allowance to "spend" on fossil-fuelled things such as flights, heating and petrol. The idea is radical, and - with its wartime connotations - evokes images of shared sacrifice in the face of a great emergency. However, it would not be easy to implement: because carbon rations would have to be tradable in order to be economically efficient, the government would need to set up and police 48 million carbon accounts. This presents privacy as well as administrative problems. It also establishes carbon as a kind of parallel currency: people who are over their ration limit (or have already sold their share) would have to buy carbon at market prices in order to purchase fuel. We would, in effect, need to become a nation of carbon currency speculators - quite a tall order, when most people can barely even manage their mortgage.
This is where cap and share comes in. The proposal being considered by the Irish government - and likely to be announced in December's budget - takes a very different angle. Carbon permits are created not to regulate individual consumption, but to share among all adult citizens the revenue generated from carbon trading. In order to sell petrol, a company such as Shell would need to have sufficient permits. It would need to buy these from Irish citizens, who would then find themselves receiving £100 or more in the post in order to offset rising prices at the pump.
As Richard Douthwaite, an ecological economist who sits on the council advising the Irish government about the system, explains: "Cap and share is a way of upping the price of fossil fuels and recycling the money to citizens. It is rationing at the top level rather than at the level of individuals."
So, instead of setting up a new currency in carbon, cap and share utilises the oldest rationing system in the book: the price mechanism. You don't need a carbon credit card; petrol will still be bought and sold in plain old money. But the price will go up, because petrol entering the economy will be restricted in line with the legally established need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead of going to the companies or the government, however, the extra revenue from these higher prices will be going back to ordinary consumers. The higher price establishes a clear incentive for people to adopt low-carbon lifestyles, while ensuring that the poor are not disadvantaged and that the rich - who tend to have higher emissions - pay more.
Cap and share would not cover the whole economy. The current Irish proposal is for only the road transport sector to be included at the initial stage. Nor need it regulate industrial emissions, which are covered by the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme. Because of the ETS, cap and share need only cover those instances where consumers buy fossil fuels directly, generally for either domestic heating or transport.
If the cap and share scheme is duly implemented, Ireland will have invented an ingenious way of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions with a minimum of pain and fuss. Most people may even find themselves better off. Here in the UK, even though we, too, have a climate bill going through parliament, there is little sign from the government of coherent thinking about how any of it will actually be implemented. I suggest a trip to Dublin - by ferry, of course.
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Sharing out the rations
Richard Douthwaite, Irish Times, 13 Jan 2007
Energy and the economy: From now on our energy and food bills will take an increasing chunk of our incomes, writes economist Richard Douthwaite.
When the US cyclist Floyd Landis was accused of taking a performance-enhancing drug after winning the 2006 Tour de France his supporters pointed out that his performance had not been exceptional. He had, they said, delivered an energy output of only 280 watts for the five hours of his winning ride, whereas he had averaged 320 watts for six hours in training.
Drug-assisted or not, Landis is a superb athlete. A normally-fit man would be doing well to produce 75 watts an hour, or about three kilowatt-hours (kWh) in the course of a 40-hour working week. As electricity now costs 14.5 cents per kWh, including VAT, the energy value of a week of hard human labour is about 45c, or just over 1c an hour. A litre of petrol has an energy content of 8.9kWh and is, therefore, equivalent to three weeks' manual work. Yet it is priced at only about Û1.04, including lots of duty and tax.
The gulf between the cost of human energy and that of the fossil variety explains why employers have spent so much time over the years searching for ways to use less of the former and more of the latter. The substitutions they have made have given an enormous boost to the productivity of the workers they employ, and some of the benefits of this have been passed on in higher wages.
In fact they have generated a virtuous circle, with the higher incomes produced by the extra productivity making fossil energy even more affordable, and thus more attractive to use. Swedish figures show that between 1920 and 1970 the length of time it took the average worker to earn enough to buy a kilowatt-hour fell from about 400 seconds to 25.
In minutes of work, the price of other goods and services has fallen, too, reflecting the extent to which it has been possible to use the increasingly cheap energy to provide them. So, for example, the price of a 1.3kg chicken in the US fell from 157 minutes' worth of work in 1920 to 14 minutes in 1997. Eggs took a sixteenth of the time to earn in 1997, sugar and bacon a sixth and milk and beef a fifth in comparison with 1920.
These falls forced farmers to increase their personal output, and thus the size of their operations, just to keep their incomes in line with those of everyone else. Millions of people who once would have worked the land became surplus to requirements in the countryside and drifted into the towns, searching for ways to support themselves. The world's megacities were born.
The price falls also meant that people had to spend a smaller and smaller proportion of their earnings on fuel and food. This allowed an increasing amount of discretionary spending and created the space in which a consumer society could develop.
The average Irish family now spends about 20 per cent of its income on food and only 3.8 per cent on energy for heating, cooking, lighting and all its electronic gadgets. As a result it has 75 per cent of its after-tax earnings left for such things as transport (16.4 per cent), services of all sorts (25.7 per cent) and renting or buying a house (9.6 per cent).
The adoption of industrial methods has meant that it now takes a surprising amount of energy to produce a person's food. A Swedish researcher, Folke Gunther, has estimated that, on average, one unit of fossil energy is required to produce one unit of energy in the food, and then 10 units of fossil energy to process, pack and transport that food to the consumer. As the average person needs 1,000kWh of food energy in a year, a family of four requires the use of about 44,000kWh of fossil energy to produce its food supply. As a result, Gunther argues that there is far greater potential for a family to save energy by buying locally grown, organically produced food than by scrapping its car or ceasing to heat its house.
As the cost of fossil energy rises as a result of oil and gas depletion, the cost of the 44,000kWh will go up, too, and, quite soon, families will find that switching to organic produce is the sensible thing to do, because, provided it is local, it will cost no more than the conventionally grown kind. The prices of conventionally grown cereals are already shooting up. US corn and wheat prices have both increased by about 50 per cent since September, and they are currently trading at prices higher than they have been for 10 years.
It is not just the extra cost of the energy used to grow crops that is responsible for this rise. Another factor is that increasing amounts of food are being burned as fuel. This makes sense. If wood pellets for your stove sell at €160 a ton in Ireland and barley can be had for €108.50, why not burn barley? "The Envirotec Corn Stove can heat your home safely and efficiently for a bushel of corn per day," says a Canadian website, and, throughout North America, corn-stove makers are struggling to keep up with demand.
But people burning food to heat their homes are still doing very little to reduce the global food supply in comparison with the firms turning wheat and corn into alcohol to be added to petrol. In the middle of last year, at a time when world grain stocks were at a 30-year low, the US was using 20 per cent of its corn crop to produce alcohol in 97 plants and had another 44 plants under construction. In Europe, 60 per cent of the rapeseed crop already goes to produce biodiesel.
Put starkly, the rich are buying up food to run their cars at the expense of the world's poor. What will happen to the millions living on less than $1 a day now that their food costs are beginning to rise? In the long term we can expect many more of them to be employed growing food and fuel in the countryside and their numbers in the megacities to decline. In the short term, however, malnutrition and starvation will increase unless some sort of world energy-rationing system is put in place (see below). And what about us? The golden age in which we could expect our incomes to increase in real terms year after year is almost gone. From now on we have to expect the long-running trend towards lower prices to go into reverse and for our energy and food bills to take an increasing chunk of our incomes.
Whatever union negotiators do, our wages will not keep up with rises in the cost of living, and we will have less money for other things, such as buying property. As a result, house prices will fall in relation to wages, cushioning people not yet on the property ladder from the worst effects of their loss of purchasing power. Most of us, however, will gradually be forced to spend less on nonessentials and the consumer society will decline.
THE ARGUMENT FOR RATIONING
What do responsible governments do in wartime when a vital commodity gets scarce? Do they leave it to the market to distribute, so that the poor get none at all? No, they ration it, so that everyone gets a share.
Fossil energy is now getting scarce, and, unless the world rations oil, gas and coal use, the huge productivity gains that people can make by using these fuels for manufacturing things will enable them to out-compete workers using just the energy from human, animal and solar sources. Unless, that is, the price of fossil fuel goes to truly extraordinary heights.
Without rationing, a vicious, polarising circle could be set up, with high fossil-energy users earning more than low fossil- energy users. This could enable the high users to continue to buy and use the lion's share of earth's remaining energy stocks until the point were reached at which the low users could not afford to buy fossil fuel at all, not even for oil lamps at night.
What form should rationing take to avert this danger? Feasta, the NGO through which I do a lot of my work, suggests that, rather than ration fossil fuels themselves, governments should ration the right to emit the greenhouse gases they release when they are burned. It argues that the very limited capacity of the atmosphere to accept further greenhouse emissions without causing a climate catastrophe should be divided equally among the world's adult population and issued to us individually as a human right.
Each year we would each receive a certificate showing our share of the total amount of emissions the world community had decided it could risk releasing that year. We would then take our certificates to the bank and sell them at the going rate, just as if they were foreign currency. The banks would consolidate the certificates and sell them on to fossil-fuel producers, who would need to acquire enough of them to cover the emissions from their output. You can find more about this at www.capandshare.org.
The certificates would not only ensure that the world hit whatever emissions target it set for itself but also give the poorest people in the world something to sell, to help offset the higher cost of their food and fuel. As the world's fossil-fuel use was progressively restricted, their share of the global emissions would become worth more and more. The polarising effects of differences in energy use would be lessened, and a fairer world should come about.
Richard Douthwaite is an economist and a co-founder of the Dublin-based Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability.
Copyright © 2007 The Irish Times
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Radical overhaul of emissions allocation required
Richard Douthwaite, Irish Times, 28 Nov 2005
As the Montreal conference on global warming opens, we cannot hope for progress on climate change unless the approach to negotiations is drastically revised, writes Richard Douthwaite.
Over the next 10 days, an estimated 10,000 people - government officials, politicians, campaigners and journalists - will converge on Montreal to try to decide how the world should halt global warming.
The meeting they are attending - COP-11, the 11th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - could scarcely be more important. A handful of sceptics apart, there is universal agreement that the survival of much of humanity depends on the eventual outcome of the process of which the COP is part.
Most of those going to Montreal accept that to stand a good chance of preventing mass extinctions, droughts, runaway melting of icecaps and the Gulf Stream turning off, the volumes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere need to be reduced sufficiently quickly to prevent Earth's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. (We have already had a third of this rise and cannot avoid one-third more.)
They also agree that unless these reductions begin within about five years, the rate at which cuts would have to proceed would be so rapid that many people might regard them as impossible.
Yet, in spite of this consensus, for all the progress that those heading for Montreal will make, they might as well stay at home. The reason is simple: the UN process for agreeing an international emissions reduction treaty has been set up in a way which guarantees its failure.
The most fundamental problem with it is that because climate change is caused by the way our economic system operates, halting it can only be achieved by making profoundly radical changes to that system.
However, the UN process militates against any radical proposals being put forward as governments and international agencies are the only bodies which can introduce ideas to it. Governments naturally favour only those ideas that suit their immediate national interests, while academic economists and NGOs self-censor their proposals as they have to get them adopted by governments if they are to have a chance of going anywhere.
If a government finds an idea it likes, it will seek support from other nations with similar interests and develop it as a draft treaty which other nations can accept, reject or attempt to amend line by line.
The rich countries have an big advantage here because of their experience and diplomatic resources but, since really radical redistributive ideas will never be put forward by the EU or the US, they are unlikely to propose a treaty which reflects the interests of the majority of the world. As a result, the chances are that no treaty will be achieved at all.
The second problem with the UN process is that to be of any value, the treaty would have to set out how the very restricted amount of the main greenhouse gas - about 900 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide - should be allocated around the world over the next century.
No country is going to be happy with its allocation given the importance of energy to everything it does, in particular, to its achievement of economic growth.
Yet the UN process consists entirely of negotiations between nations. As a result, it inevitably sets every country against all the others since, if one country is allocated more emissions, the other countries have less to share.
The negotiations which have taken place so far show this quite clearly. The "developing" countries have argued that they need a bigger allocation in order to be able to catch up with the rich countries which have caused the climate problem. South Africa is a good example. With only 0.7 per cent of the world's population, it is responsible for 1.4 per cent of global emissions. Will it cut these back?
No, says its government. We need to increase the amount of fossil energy we use, hence our emissions, if we are to lift millions of our people out of poverty.
The truth, of course, is that there are two South Africas. One is a grossly over-developed country which should be making emissions reductions now, the other a very poor "developing" country which the over-developed one is using as an excuse to shirk its international responsibilities.
Some of those heading for Montreal argue that countries should be given emissions rations on the basis of their populations. Others say this would be unfair, as more energy is needed to live in some parts of the world than others. A third group led by Brazil argues that the countries which caused the climate problem in the past through heavy emissions should get a smaller allocation now to compensate.
And then there are leaders like George Bush and Tony Blair who shy away from any emissions rationing at all because of the damage that they think that would do to their economies.
The UN negotiations might have a better chance of success if they were carried out on an entirely different basis.
Suppose that emissions were shared out not country-by-country, but person-by-person. Under this arrangement, every quarter or every year each person in the world would receive a ration permit entitling him or her to burn whatever amount of fossil fuel would result in the release of their portion of the allowable weight of greenhouse gas allocated for that year.
Recipients would not, of course, be entitled to the fuel itself, but they would be able to sell their permits through a bank or post office just as if they were foreign currency.
The banks would sell the permits on to companies who wished to buy fossil fuel from mines or from oil and gas producers. The producers in turn would have to present the permits to international inspectors who would check that the number they had received corresponded with the emissions to be released by the amount of fossil fuel they had delivered.
Under this individualised system, people whose lifestyles required a lot of energy would have to make changes regardless of whether they lived in India or the US, and people who boosted their productivity with fossil energy would have to pay for the right to do so by buying permits from those who used less of it.
This system is not necessarily fair as people in some parts of the world have challenges to overcome before they can live as well on their emissions ration as their counterparts elsewhere.
To meet these circumstances, Feasta, the Dublin-based Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability with which I work, has suggested that some of each person's emissions allocation should be held back and given to governments to sell so that they have the funds to put their countries in as favourable a position as the rest of the world.
But an allocation system on these lines is too radical to be considered - and still less be adopted - by the UN process. Moreover, it is only one of the major economic changes that are required to solve the climate crisis.
Our national economies have been structured in such a way that if they don't grow, investment stops, unemployment soars and they collapse into a deep depression.
Consequently, no government will dare tackle the climate crisis until that defect in their economic structure has been changed. But as no one will talk about how the structure might be changed in Montreal or in any other mainstream forum in the immediate future, there is no hope of serious cuts in emissions starting within the next five years.
Richard Douthwaite is the author of "The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the World".
Copyright © 2005 The Irish Times