Resource control by a sustainability based currency equivalent

Abstract

Mitigation of CO2 emissions is the greatest task of this century. It requires the abandonment of fossil fuels and the complete restructuring of industrial processes. Earlier concepts for CO2 mitigation focused exclusively on emission control. Here, a system of resource control is proposed that limits the extraction of fossil fuels and abiotic resources, as well as the use of land. Efforts in the reduction of resource consumption are often accompanied by switching to other resources as the replacement of fossil fuels by biofuels shows. For preventing this shift, a global system of resource control is desirable. For this purpose, resource shares are generated and distributed to the world's population for purchasing products made by virgin resources. These shares are handed from merchants via manufacturers to resource producers, who return them to an administrative body as an extraction fee. Trading between individuals allows persons with low resource consumption to achieve an additional income, while high resource consumption results in higher expenditures. A specified inflation rate on resource prices reduces consumption over the years to a sustainable limit. This proposal focuses particularly on fossil fuel extraction, which represents about 75% of all resources covered by this scheme.