Agenda for Feasta - Cap and Share Weekend 18 - 20 January 2008
From Cap and Share Wiki
Friday 18 January 2008
Public Meeting
Venue: St. John's Church, Totnes. 7.30pm to 9.30pm
How thinking about the climate crisis needs to change
Chaired by Emer O Siochru of Cap-and-Share Ireland
Speakers:
The problems
David Wasdell of the Meridian Programme The pace at which climate change is already taking place has not been taken into account by politicians, policymakers and even the UN. Many feedback mechanisms have been ignored.
Richard Douthwaite of Feasta Peak oil and climate change both mean that the use of fossil fuels has to be rationed in some way. Unless this is done, the income gap between those who can afford to use energy and those who can't will widen considerably. Millions will starve.
The solutions
Peter Barnes of the Sky Trust, USA The benefits from and the responsibilities for the planet’s limited resources should be shared by all humankind equally. There are two similar ways in which the benefits from using fossil fuels could be shared which might enable deep emissions cuts to be made with widespread public support.
Bruce Darrell of Feasta Almost a quarter of greenhouse emissions comes from changes in land use. The incorporation of charcoal into the soil might enable millions of landowners to increase their crops while at the same time turning the land to be turned into a carbon sink rather than a source.
There will be time for questions and discussion after each speaker's presentation.
Conclusions and Close: Emer O Siochru
Feasta Climate Group and Cap and Share (Britain and Ireland)
Policy and campaign development weekend
Schumacher College, Totnes, Devon.
It is proposed that the main thrust of our discussions during the weekend should be on how Cap and Share might be advanced as a framework for an international climate treaty.
Saturday 19 January
9.00-13.00, with coffee break 10.45-11.15
Discussion of recent developments in thinking about Cap and Share
All the topics in this list have either come up in recent Climate Group e-mails or are written into the latest draft of the booklet on Cap and Share which Feasta has in preparation. The draft will be e-mailed in advance of the meeting to everyone attending. This should enable us to cover the ground in the limited time available.
1. What are we capping? C&S would not cap anyone's use of fossil fuel. Instead it would cap the amount of fossil fuel extracted each year. (As it does not ration the individual, it is quite different from a system of Personal Carbon Allowance systems like TEQs.) The rate at which the global use of fossil fuel was reduced each year (ie, each year's cap) would be set with regard to setting a maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the speed at which the maximum concentration might itself have to decline if safe environmental conditions are to be restored.
2. What are we sharing? Our thinking has moved away from sharing the remaining available atmospheric capacity since it's now apparent that there isn't any. However, people/firms are prepared to pay a lot for the right to use fossil fuel because of the benefits it confers. In doing so, they expose this and future generations to an increasing level of risk. Cap and Share is essentially a way of ensuring that, since we all share the risk, we share the benefits too. The higher the price we charge for the right to emit, the fewer low-value fossil fuel uses there will be.
3. The International Transition Fund. Sharing out the benefits of using fossil fuels equally around the world does not leave everyone in an equally good situation. The idea of the Transition Fund is that it would be distributed according to transparent criteria to governments to use to improve the situation of people badly hit either by the effects of climate change or by the inability to continue to use large amounts of fossil fuel. “Rich” countries would therefore be eligible for it as well as poorer ones. It would be solely for use on capital projects rather than income support (poverty alleviation) but would cover both “mitigation” and “adaptation”. We need to discuss the maximum size it could be and how it differs from the “Convergence Fund” in older Feasta literature.
4. The Community Level Transition Fund. Many of the changes that need to be made to enable people to live in a zero-carbon way have to be made at the level of the community rather than the household. It has been suggested that some of the emissions tonnage allocated to individuals should not be cashable by them but only by community organisations. People would choose which amongst various competing community energy projects to give this tonnage, thus providing those they chose with funds to go ahead. We need to decide if this idea for C&S should fall into the “optional extra” category, or if, since it might enable a more rapid adaptation to new circumstances and generate public support, should it become an integral part ?
5. Internalising Externalities. Some of the group feel that C&S should work on the assumption that any CO2 that is emitted back is going to have to be retrieved from the atmosphere and sequestered before its full effect on the Earth's temperature has had time to develop. This sequestering will require energy and our original thought was that fossil fuel producers should be required to invest in renewable energy projects whose output could be sold to provide the future funding for the sequestration. While this would mean that countries like Saudi Arabia would build up large renewable energy companies to provide a replacement income for themselves after their oil has gone, it would continue the polarisation of energy power and thus financial power. The consensus is now swinging towards having the Global Carbon Trust withhold enough of each year's emissions tonnage to provide it with an energy income in future to handle the sequestration. Exactly how it would invest the cash it received from the sale of each year's tonnage is not settled. Withholding this tonnage would mean that the income people received from the sale of their Pollution Authorisation Permits was lower but this is as it should be as otherwise they would be gaining from externalising the cost of removing the CO2 on to future generations. As an alternative to this, Will Howard has suggested that the Carbon Trust rent emitters the right to store their emissions in the atmosphere until they got round to sequestering them. Peter Barnes came out in support of this
- It is certainly true, and little appreciated, that the fees we (and others) are proposing to charge for carbon emissions are one-time payments for a long-term lease. It’s like buying a parking ticket that’s good for 100+ years. No commercial parking garage would ever rent space on that basis, so it makes perfect sense (in theory) to charge an annual fee for continuing to occupy the atmosphere’s limited parking space. Maybe it’s better to save this point for rhetorical use — i.e., when polluters gripe about paying $100/ton, we can point out what a good deal it is. You can pay $100 a MONTH to park a 2-ton car; here polluters are getting a 100-YEAR parking space for one ton of CO2 for the same price. Such a deal!
So far, however, we haven't been able to see how a rental system might work.
6. Cash or Pollution Authorisation Permits (PAPs) ? Some of us have been suggesting that, rather than giving each person a paper certificate which they could decided whether or not to sell, it might be better/more efficient to adopt the approach taken by the Sky Trust and have either the Global Carbon Trust or the national climate trusts auction the emissions tonnage themselves and then distribute the proceeds as cash. We ought to discuss the pros and cons of each approach.
7. Does the ebcu have a future? Many of us would argue that the introduction of a new global currency is an essential part of C&S at an international level and it would certainly bring many benefits for poorer countries. We ought to review these benefits and then go on to discuss whether basing a currency on the price of the right to emit carbon has any future if the intention is to get fossil fuel emissions very low. If we decide that it doesn't, we'll have to devise another basis for a global currency.
8. Price guarantees to fossil fuel producers. C&S would essentially set up a fossil fuel consumers' cartel to deal with a fossil fuel producers' cartel and the two would have to come to a deal at some stage over the division of the scarcity rent. The consumers would not be able to capture it all. The current draft of the document setting out the C&S concept proposes that fossil fuel producers be offered a guaranteed, rising price in purchasing power terms as their share of the rent. Are people happy with this approach?
9. Carbon tax and C&S. The economists we're dealing with in Ireland favour a carbon tax over a quota system like C&S. A carbon tax would fix the price of emissions but not the volume, a quota would fix the amount but not the price. Even so, the two can be used together, the tax reducing the amount people would get for their PAPs. There is an excellent discussion of the circumstances in which each should be used at http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/members/cameron.hepburn/Hepburn%20(2006,%20Oxrep)%20Regulation%20by%20P%20or%20Q.pdf This makes it clear that quota systems are best if one is on the point of reaching a tipping point, which seems to be the case in the climate situation and is the reason that temperature and atmospheric concentration targets are being set. Another argument in favour of C&S is that the tax system would have great difficulty in redistributing the huge flow of funds that an adequate tax would bring in. One Irish estimate is that the carbon tax would have to be €400 per tonne of CO2 to reduce emissions by 3% a year. Such a rate might be beyond the bounds of political possibility.
10. Managed PAP prices. This concerns national level C&S schemes such as the use of C&S to reduce Irish transport emissions. If you fix a tight cap, the price for PAPs could go very high. This could cause extreme hardship and disruption, even though people were receiving compensation through the sale of their PAPs One of the points of C&S is to signal to people that they need to change, and an ultra-high carbon price might be above the level required to give an effective signal. It is therefore proposed that the Irish government should give a long-term signal by announcing a steadily rising maximum and minimum carbon price for, say, the next five years. If, in any year, the maximum was in danger of being exceeded, addition tonnage would be bought in from the ETS by the national Irish Climate Trust. If the minimum needed to be maintained, PAPs would be bought by the Trust and destroyed. Are people happy with this? Managing prices in this way would not be required (or possible) in a global system.
11. Commons Trust(s). Should Peter Barnes’s ideas about developing a major third sector of the economy (alongside the state and companies) to look after commons such as the atmosphere play a take more central role in the C&S model.? Should we spell out the institutional arrangements in more detail?
Lunch 13.00
Afternoon 15.00- 18.00, with 10-minute tea break around 16.30
Looking ahead
1. Getting C&S adopted in the teeth of a global recession. Brian Davey writes: “Because of the credit crunch, the uneven development and imbalances in the world economy, the financial crisis is likely to develop into a recession and perhaps even a major depression. If and when it does, attention and resources may be diverted away from dealing with climate change and the necessary changes to the energy system - especially as emissions typically fall in a recession.” This session will explore the way in which high carbon prices, achieved through C&S, might be presented as a way out of the recession.
2. The knock-on changes in society and in other systems if C&S is introduced. If a high carbon price is to be used to reduce emissions an inflation will be required. All prices in an economy would need to change in relation to each other if the cost of fossil energy went up significantly because each requires a different proportion of energy for its delivery. Central banks need to recognise this. Money creation trusts, rather than the commercial banks or governments, should put the new money into circulation by distributing it on an equal per capita basis. People in high income countries need to recognise that higher energy prices mean that the amount of money they will have available for consumption will fall. On the other hand, incomes in poorer countries will increase.
3. Can, and should, sequestration and changes in land use be incorporated into the C&S system? A high carbon price would increase the demand for biofuels. This would put extra pressure on the world's forests and accelerate changes in land use. Can a system be found that would rapidly reduce emissions from “LULUCF” while at the same time encouraging the sequestration of carbon in the soil? Ideally, any such system should be compatible with C&S but should it become part of the C&S model.
4. Changes in international power and trade arrangements. Are there ways in which we can use changes in major international political and economic forces to help get C&S adopted globally? Cap-and-trade is already positioning itself with credits from the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation and by making proposals for an international network of emissions trading systems modelled on the EU ETS. The Bali Road Map highlights technology transfer and finance, adaptation, mitigation and forests. Can C&S harness changes in the relative economic power of the dollar and euro, between west and east , between fossil fuel producers and users or between electorates and governments? How does competitiveness, border tariffs and the WTO fit in? Could control of international emissions (aviation and marine) form the initial institutional basis for a Global Climate Trust?
18.00 Evening meal
19.30 Four 15-minute presentations by participants on the work they are doing
- Brian Davey on Coal and Carbon Capture and Storage
- You ?
- ?
- ?
20.30 Rob Hopkins on the Transition Towns movement
21.30 Adjourn to the College bar.
Sunday 20 January
9.00-10.15
The present situation and next steps – short reports and discussion:
- Mark Rutledge on what we need to do to get C&S taken up by the UNFCCC process.
- David Healy, Thomas Legge and Micheala Goetzmann on the likelihood of C&S being adopted in Ireland to control road transport emissions.
- Will Howard on C&S in the UK.
- Peter Barnes on the USA.
- Emer O Siochru on the prospects of a legal challenge to the ETS
- Other participants
10.15 - 10.45 Coffee break
10.45 – 12.15
Divide into Feasta and C&S to plan programmes
Feasta: Publication plans, research, liaison with governments, speaking engagements (Details later)
C&S: The eight points below come from deliberations by C&S (Britain). Ireland and others may have other ideas that we should amend the agenda to accommodate.
1. C&S in Ireland – one example “on the ground” would kick start the whole process of getting C&S onto the political agenda worldwide. How can we best support this?
2. Outreach – It may be possible to “kill several birds with one stone”. These outreach meetings would be about exploring the long-term acceptability of cap-and-share. Rather than “preaching to people” we ask would them their opinions and preferences to the various ways for trying to control emissions. Three main social groups can be identified for meetings – the public, companies and administrators. Some form of structured research can be carried out by core C&S campaigners. The concept of can be developed in a looser way for local meetings as well. The results can be presented to the media and policy makers.
3. Signing up to a cap-and-share approach and/or media worthy legal petition – We need a way for individuals and groups to show their support for a cap-and-share approach (it may not be called cap-and-share, or agree to the same precise points in all countries). One possibility is a form of words that might be used in several ways – as a legal challenge through various avenues like the EU petitioning process; to present politicians; to use in adverts or leaflets. Another possibility is a discussion pack around a longer “consideration” of the cap-and-share idea. How about a cap-and-share awareness ribbon?
4. Legislative input – In the end we have to influence legislation. Presently this involves the Climate Change Bills (in the UK and Ireland), the EUETS and the UNFCCC Bali Road Map. There may be leverage in the need for these to be harmonised in the future.
5. International and national website(s), wiki and materials – What form do we want information and materials to take? How should these be authored and designed? Major promoting of international support, activity and links.
6. Conference(s) 2008 - Is there a place for some form of cap-and-share conference(s) in the autumn of 2008 which we could usefully publicise through out the year? Should this/these be through novel web technology, in a physical location or a combination of the two? Could these be used to further our outreach and lobbying? What might the themes be?
7. Press work - We have not had much luck getting on the press's “radar” yet. Could a small group work on this - lists, contacts, articles, events, etc ?
8. Fundraising – the perennial problem!
12.15 -13.00
Report back and co-ordinate programmes.
13.00 Lunch
People will be free to depart from 14.00 onwards but conversations are likely to take place through the afternoon, so leave as late as you reasonably can.
NOTES:
Please let me know if there is anything missing which ought to be included and suggest where it might go.
We are likely to have over 30 people at the meeting. This is too many to have proper discussions as a single group. One suggestion is that for the three Saturday sessions (ie, two in the morning and one in the afternoon) we divide into three groups of 11 or 12, but that the composition of each group be changed for each session so that, by the end of the day, we've all been in at least one group with everyone else. We'd have to pre-allocate people to groups so that there was always a good balance in each. If we used this device, someone would say a few words about each topic to all 30 plus of us, we'd discuss it in our group for a few minutes, and then report our conclusions to the others to see if they had come to a similar result. Please let me know if you can think of an improvement on this or if you would be happy to introduce a topic.
The best arrangements for the Sunday morning – how many people are interested on working which particular areas etc – can be settled on Saturday.
Richard.
