It took place in Glencree from the 26th to the 28th of July. The purpose of the weekend was to plan the activities until the end of the year and discuss opportunities for the implementation and spreading of Cap and Share and how to move forward.
Cap and Share (C&S) emerged in late 2006 from the think tank Feasta, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, a network based in Dublin.

An article explaining the concept of Cap and Share, (which empowers the individual into making positive choices) was published in the Spring edition of LP. Here is a brief overview:

The weight of greenhouse gases emissions to be released in a year would be limited (capped and successive years’ caps would grow tighter and tighter to bring emissions down to a level at which climate change ceased. One part of the share is the emissions entitlement given to every adult annually. Most people would sell their entitlements for cash but they would have the option of destroying them and reducing the world’s emissions by the amount they had been allocated. Unlike some proposals, emissions entitlements would not be needed to buy energy. Besides sharing emission-rights between people, C&S also shares the profits from the scarcity of fossil fuels between producer and consumer. It also shares energy use between this and future generations. C & S is a very attractive model for other national, regional and global frameworks that can be built up scheme by scheme with widespread public

I had the opportunity to participate at the Feasta’s climate change weekend; we were twenty in total, coming from various different backgrounds but all concerned about climate change. The chair, Bruce Darrell took us through a business like discussion of the working detail of cap and share - how tight the cap should be, how it relates to key questions like fossil fuel depletion, land use and bio-fuels and who should decide on the tightness of the cap. We then looked for step by step approaches to bringing in cap and share - e.g. through a transport emissions cap and share scheme, probably first of all in Ireland.
Currently one of the first steps being considered is to use C&S to control and reduce the EU’s fast growing transport emissions and it is currently being seriously considered in Ireland to overcome the rise in CO2 emissions from road transport that were 2.5 times greater in 2005 than they were in 1990. Saturday evening was given over to a discussion on sustainable happiness introduced by Victoria from the New Economics Foundation and Danny Day from Eprida.

In association with the University of Georgia, Eprida has developed a method of producing biofuels and valuable coproducts which also allows greenhouse gases to be removed from the air and sequestered in the soil. Danny Day, a representative from Eprida discussed how new biotechnologies can increase crop yields, extract a wide range of fuels, foods, chemicals and materials from the plants themselves and sequester perhaps a third of their carbon in the soil. (See www.eprida.com.)

We spent Sunday morning working out how to turn the ideas into a programme of work divided up between Feasta and the Cap and Share campaign.

Participants discussed how Cap and Share emissions entitlements should be distributed, especially in the global South, where records of who lived where were poor and, in any case, it might not be culturally appropriate to give entitlements personally to each individual.
Research is to continue on this issue. One of the participants and founders member of Feasta, author and economist Richard Douthwaite, thinks that it will be very difficult to make the transition from a world in which output increases each year thanks to increased fossil fuel use to one in which energy is scarce and expensive without changing the way money is put into circulation. “Until recently, if more money was put into circulation, it was possible to increase the energy supply and thus validate that money” he says. “Now that we’ve passed the oil peak and need to cut the use of other fossil fuels for climate reasons, less and less energy is going to be available - or should be. So if more money goes into circulation, it won’t be possible to validate it in energy terms. In fact, rather than money buying energy, energy will buy money. The people producing energy will be the world’s new bankers unless we share the power that that would give them. That’s why its so important that communities develop their own renewable energy sources and the scarcity value of the remaining fossil energy is shared, which is what Cap and Share does.”

According to another participant Jo Bess, who is an independent commentator on Climate Change, Energy policy and Carbon Frameworks, there was a concentration of so many active, smart minds that the air was thick with ideas, an excellent atmosphere in which to contemplate Carbon Policy.” The Irish warm welcome was superb, both in Dublin and the green-gold Wicklow Mountains. People will be amazed at the next Feasta move, launching Cap & Share on an unsuspecting Irish and British audience from the heady heights of intellectual prowess. Cap & Share will be an essential part of the London Frameworks Conference in November 2007”. Other participant Stephen Douglas mentioned “Without something like Cap and Share we’ll never get close to meeting our Kyoto targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The participation at the Climate change gathering was very inspiring and campaign activities, talks and opportunities to spread our ideas are beginning to run beyond the group’s capacity to handle them on a voluntary, spare-time basis on potential activities such as an Irish-Anglo Climate Forum as well as spreading the international contact. C&S counts with support in Canada, other EU Countries and China