Encourages international cooperation
rather than competition

The international negotiations under the UNFCCC banner to agree a climate treaty are making very slow progress because no framework, no set of principles, has yet been agreed as the basis on which to proceed. Not even a temperature or atmospheric concentration target has yet been set. As a result, the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated on an ad hoc basis, with each industrialised nation, or group of nations, making an offer on the amount it would cut its emissions below their 1990 level.

One reason the pace is so slow is that 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. No country is going to be happy with any allocation given the importance of energy to everything it does, in particular, to its achievement of economic growth. Its politicians will therefore always argue that their country is a special case and needs rather more.

The Cap and Share approach puts an end to this type of beggar-my-neighbour negotiation. It says that, rather than sharing the right to emit country-by-country, you share it amongst people and, as people, we all get an equal share.

By providing a clear framework within which the UNFCCC negotiations could take place, Cap and Share should make it very much easier to agree an effective international climate treaty in the time left before it becomes impossible to achieve the 2 degree temperature target.

How fossil fuel emissions could be shared

Under cap and share, the world's carbon dioxide emissions would be cut back annually, as represented by the sloping line. Each year, the entire emissions allocation would be shared equally among the world population except during the first, say, twenty years, when some of the allocation (represented by the hatched area) would be issued to governments to enable them to make their economies less reliant on fossil fuels.