Madeline Ostrander interviewed James Hansen for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Madeline is YES! Magazine’s senior editor. Before the text of the interview, she introduces YES! readers to Dr. Hansen.
The following is a Zemanta enhanced version of the introduction with the usual added images, captions, and Easter eggs by yours truly, plus, as extra special holiday bonus, some snarky interjections.
- Image via Wikipedia
NASA climate scientist James Hansen never expected the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen to amount to much. He told the British Guardian newspaper that it would be better if Copenhagen failed. That’s because Hansen is a vocal critic of the economic policies discussed there, and he hopes Copenhagen’s failure gives the public a chance to talk about new options.
Hansen is arguably the world’s best known and most respected climate scientist. Sometimes called the “grandfather of climate change,” he began modeling the effects of warming three decades ago and first testified about climate change before Congress in 1988. He was one of the key figures to blow the whistle on the Bush Administration for censoring science and trying to muzzle warnings about the urgency of the climate crisis.
In the past few years, Hansen has expanded his activities outside the laboratory and into the political fray. In June, he was arrested after marching at a rally against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.
The Massey site is quite proximate to Marsh Elementary School, thus well-chosen as the spot for more arrests, to include the arrest of NASA’s chief climate scientist. By quite proximate we mean the elementary school playground, in which several hundred protesters gathered, is less than 300 feet away from Massey Energy’s Goals Coal preparation plant.
This blog also would like to interject that he developed a very simple method for evaluating climate change policy, which this blog refers to as the Hansen Test. One question, “Does the action (or inaction) allow coal to continue to be used and emit CO2 in the atmosphere?”
The fact that he is a renown spokesperson emphasizing the critical importance of reducing coal emissions is reason enough for his statements to be attacked. Back to the introduction of Dr. Hansen to YES! readers.
More recently, he has become a leading opponent of cap-and-trade, a market approach to greenhouse gas regulation that puts a limit on how much carbon can be emitted and then allows polluters to trade permits to emit. Hansen claims the approach ultimately will not produce the kinds of emissions cuts the world needs to avoid catastrophic climate change. It will simply allow “polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars,” he says. He is especially critical of the large number of offsets available under the current policy proposals, which allow polluters to pay for emissions reductions elsewhere in the world. He points to some offset schemes that have led to fraud, giving credit for pollution reductions that never actually happened.
Hansen is championing an alternative solution called fee-and-dividend, which would impose a fee on any pollution source (mines, ports of entry) and distribute the revenue back to the public. Both fee-and-dividend and cap-and-trade attempt to reduce carbon emissions by raising the price of fossil fuels, but Hansen insists the former is simpler and less vulnerable to speculation and gaming.
Advocates of cap-and-trade have been dismissive of Hansen’s arguments. David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council says Hansen is simply wrong about cap-and-trade, insists the approach has been effective in the European Union, and maintains that the leading bills now before Congress have enough safeguards to avoid market manipulation. Economist Paul Krugman accuses Hansen of naïve thinking: “hard-science guys tend to assume that [economists are] witch doctors with nothing to tell them.”
Coal,” says a foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”Hansen has faced off critics before. He is not alone in his critique. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, says that “carbon-trading represents an unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and … offsets … threaten to become a resource grab of colonial proportions.” The Indigenous Environmental Network calls cap-and-trade a false solution “that will allow the fossil fuel industry to continue to do what they do—drill, baby, drill.” In November, two longtime U.S. EPA attorneys published a video online calling cap-and-trade “a huge mistake.”
The point of re-posting the YES! introduction? Well, Dr. Hansen got his wish. At least, the part about COP15 failing to introduce carbon trading on a global scale. This blog is unsure whether his proposal could work; a knee jerk response is that it fails because it is an intervention designed to protect life on the planet as we know it, rather than finding away to afford the real limousines to the soiree after a 2-week conference fails miserably.
BTW: Calling James Hansen naive is like calling Amory Lovins stupid. You possibly could be right in some way, yet very much run the risk of being tarred with the same brush. Beside, if you asked Hansen if he is an expert on international economics or policy, no doubt he would disavow such expertise. Unfortunately, for 3 decades he has seen a failure of climate policy, and, so believes it necessary to speak out. And, quite frankly he is correct that a fee on the raw material mined or drilled would be a deterrent.
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- James Hansen, In His Own Words (treehugger.com)
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Professor Gumption, a.k.a., Jim Hansen writes for the Guardian that Copenhagen, a.k.a., COP15, has given us the chance to face climate change with honesty. The piece for the Guardian is a repeat of the YES! interview, i.e., we need to put a carbon-use dividend into effect for everybody. Hansen is adamant that such a strategy must replace the ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme, which had been proposed leading up to and at Copenhagen, but which the UNFCC Conference of Parties failed to adopt. “Now there is a chance for the world to get on to an honest, effective path to an agreement,” writes Hansen at the start of the Guardian article.
While the chart separates developing from developed nations and suggests a correlation between growth in global emissions with growth in emissions by developing countries, supposedly at COP15 Obama and the U.S. delegation called attention to a different separation, that between the largest polluters and the rest of the world.
As yet, the advantage for the world is unclear. It does change the perception that developing countries are to be penalized for being the latecomers (Hey, Asia, clean up that mess we made with our economic growth in the 1990′s). The response from China was to tie emission goals to economic growth.
Separating the largest polluters and the rest of the world allows for climate policy based upon a different model. Instead of reparations to countries harmed by past pollution, the focus is upon a reduction from the major sources, e.g., investment in “clean coal”, nuclear power, or anything else that can take a coat of green wash.
It definitely is a power play since the major economies / polluters are continuing with Business As Usual. The Conference of the Parties failed to adopt a global carbon market strategy, much to the dismay of the carbon marketers, so instead of a little “bakeesh”, what Jim Hansen calls hush money, the major polluters now seem to have turned to extortion, e.g., You got a pretty planet here, yeah, would be a shame to see it go to 770ppm.
Wikipedia suggest you see also:
Giving attribution, where attribution is due, this blog got the idea that it no longer is a matter of Developed vs. Developing countries, rather it is a matter of the major emitters vs. everyone else, from the Indispensable Blog and Andrew Light, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, although this blog agreed more with the less optimistic take by HuffPo contributor Johann Hari.
And, while shifting commentary — we don’t say repetition at After Gutenberg, we say recursion — it bears repeating that the “voluntary climate pact” by BASIC (Brazil – Africa, South – India – China) with US going along for the ride, failed to produce commitments on emissions reductions.
Elsewhere there was commentary that it bodes well for India and China relations, and standing up to the white skin minority, and saying we won’t clean up your mess anymore, we want to make our own.
And the Dragon just smiles and bides its time.
It looks as if Hansen’s idea of a fee at point of entry is being quickly challenged. SciAm relates some of the unfolding story, it would seem that such legislation “unfairly discourages coal-powered electricity sales in favor of renewably powered electricity.”
Anyone care to bet that those North Dakota officials are benefiting from the best legal advice that Emperor Fossil can buy?
The SciAm article further relates:
Returning to the chart, it is worth noting that how much aviation and marine transportation GHG emissions were made part of humanity’s carbon footprint.
As this blog has noted repeatedly, increasing emissions from the transportation sector is nearly as catastrophic as coal-fired electric power. The emphasis in the U.S., and more successfully in Japan and Europe has been the reduction of emissions from passenger vehicles. After all, it is easier for City Hall to go against John Q. Citizen than against Mister Major Campaign Contributor.
Mike Millikin relays the results of a study entitled “Aviation and Marine Transportation: GHG Mitigation Potential and Challenges (PDF)”. Published by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and written by David McCollum and Gregory Gould, both from UC Davis and the Institute of Transportation Studies there; and David Greene, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the report:
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