The International Response to Climate Change
April 18, 2011
One Solution: Cap and Share. “Cap and share” is an attempt to share the cost and the work of fighting climate change among all the nations of the world. It proposes that a Global Atmosphere Trust should be set up to represent everyone’s interests, not just those of powerful groups in powerful countries. The trust would cap fossil-fuel emissions at their current level. Then it would take the advice of leading climate scientists on how rapidly it should reduce that cap year by year. Political and economic considerations would have to be ignored as Earth’s systems will not take these into account.
This is a chapter from The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises (2010).