NASA's Hansen Calls Out Obama On Climate Change 461
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, writes in the NY Times that he was troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves 'regardless of what we do.' According to Hansen 'Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.' Hansen says that instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world's governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year."
"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:4, Insightful)
The level playing field for carbon neutrality is a sham designed to do nothing more than transfer wealth from first-world economies to third-world economies. In the process, all you really do is set a soft cap on carbon emissions without reducing actual dependence upon fossil fuels.
We can achieve the same goal of reducing carbon output by instead investing that money into first-world research and development of alternative fuels. Full implementation then eliminates carbon emissions altogether, a goal which can't be achieved by market-based carbon neutrality alone.
The problem no one will mention (Score:2, Insightful)
Overpopulation.
If you want less carbon emitted, reduce our population.
We are not going to achieve zero carbon emissions, but we need more (a) natural land and forests to absorb that and (b) fewer producing sources.
All people produce some carbon. Having seven and then nine billion people guarantees we will be unable to stop the increase even if we all live in mud huts, eat vegetables and bury our poop.
Again. (Score:3, Insightful)
Politician: "My advisers inform me that if we do not take action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, there will be serious global climate repercussions."
Public: "Well, reduce emissions then."
Politician: "This does mean some unavoidable increase in gas prices, but -"
Public: "FUCK THE CLIMATE! Give us cheap gas!"
People are happy to do something to help reduce emissions, providing this something doesn't involve any expense or inconvenience for them personally. Politicians know this. There is a big public demand to exploit every drop of oil that can be found in order to keep gas prices down, and it's very difficult for anyone hoping to get elected again to go against that.
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:4, Insightful)
So he wants Imperialism... (Score:4, Insightful)
So on this website whenever Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc. do anything that America doesn't like it's universally applauded as "standing up against evil imperialist right-wing Chrisitan America" No matter how bad or destructive the action, it's OK because it's "speaking truth to power" or some nonsense.
Now we have Canada basically saying that it's going to use its own oil, and the exact same people are going apoplectic. International intervention suddenly become
Note that these same people are strangely silent when Brazil or Venezuela develop new oil resources, and I haven't heard any huge outrage over the fact that drilling off the coast of Cuba will put oil rigs just a few miles from the Florida Keys. The same people who complain that America == Somalia (you've seen those posts) because we don't have the federal government in control of all economic activity never complain when foreign corporations drill for oil righ in the middle of sensitive areas.. as long as the money will be going to a government they approve of.
I've come to realize that environmental movement doesn't really care about what is done to the planet, only on who is doing it. Put up a windmill in America that a bird might run into? Destroying the world! Use nuclear power in Japan? CHINA SYNDROME! Setup nuclear plants in Iran that are known to be using unsafe designs that are intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium instead of producing electricity? No problem. Put an oil pipeline directly through the rainforest in Venezuela to prop up Hugo Chavez? That's a wonder of the world showing how great socialism is!
I've seen it all before and this is just a thin coating of green paint on a corrupt and broken set of ideas.
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but something doesn't adds up here.
It's just nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the vast amount of energy the sun is pumping into earth (not to mention all the stuff that doesn't hit earth....). We need to get to that, instead of plundering resources that could be used for other things other than just burning them, or in some cases even are best just left there. If worst comes to worst, we let "elites" and private, short-sighted interests run amok with this, and when they're done with it let it serve as an excuse for even more control and subsidies (for more stuff that does more harm than good, ofc). Instead of, you know, being gentle(wo)men and trying to get free energy, shelter and food for everybody. How can we even look in the mirror.. Oh wait, we can't, that solves that.
I know this is a rather random rant off-topic; I have no clue about the details about any of this, anyway... but "the big picture" gets me every time. It's just nuts! No convincing me otherwise.. we have a veritable Garden of Eden on one hand, and New York and Calcutta is what we turn it into. WTF.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:5, Insightful)
The level playing field for carbon neutrality is a sham designed to do nothing more than transfer wealth from first-world economies to third-world economies.
Actually, I think the idea is to put a monetary cost on things which currently have no cost, namely, emission of gasses which may have a negative effect on climate. I think thinking that there is some conspiracy here is kind of ridiculous. One side wants to implement government regulations to reduce carbon emissions. The other side believes the market will solve these problems. So we arrive at a compromise where we attempt to achieve our goal (reducing emissions) by using the market (make it have a cost). This seems entirely reasonable. Why shouldn't we attach a cost to pollution?
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:5, Insightful)
It really is the only sensible way to go about it: as you say, fossil fuels' cost doesn't represent their true cost, because they cause unreimbursed damage to ... everyone.
Use a carbon tax to make these fuels' cost represent their real cost, cut taxes somewhere else if you want to or dole the money out to the public, and let the market sort it out.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:2, Insightful)
With a little help, it's probably quite capable. The only times that capitalism has worked is when it wasn't naked.
A free market implies boundaries and regulation to keep it free!
Hippie Apocalypse (Score:0, Insightful)
I am very tired of the same old Apocalyptic rants from this stupid political straw man. "Global Warming" is now "Climate Change": a move in words that Joseph Goebbels would love! Climate change is a straw man. These people are anti-capitalists, they are Puritanical. They are elitist ecological technocrats. They are moralists! They believe that everyone should bow to their world view, the means to do that is through legislation on "climate change".
GUESS WHAT?? ITS CALLED THE WEATHER! AND IT CHANGES!!!! Why does it have to be apocalyptic, in your myopic vision? Why can't northern fields, liberated from cold produce more 10 times more food? Energy saved with mild winters would be Trillions of Barrels of oil! Deserts, emersed in the warm steamy wind off the oceans will bloom! Why not have that kind of a hippie dream? NO! instead it has to be DOOM!
Listen you liberal apocalyptic fear-mongers:
QUIT TELLING US WHAT TO DO!!!
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a false dichotomy. Both manufacture and research provide jobs, and both are being funded. There is no either/or.
There are plenty of alternative technologies already, and they need to be rolled out. Then as research comes up with better ones, the roll out will progress to better technology.
Compare and contrast with microprocessors. Would you have said in the late 1970s that we need to invest in microprocessor research RATHER THAN manufacture? That the 808*, 6502 and Z80 weren't good enough and we should wait for something better before manufacturing? Had we have done so, we'd never have had the Core 2s and such like of today. The market supplied reason, direction and finance to the research.
let's level it for real then (Score:3, Insightful)
Great principle. What about charging for the environmental destruction many third world nations are guilty of? What about charging for the enormous population growth that Asia and Africa are imposing on the world? What about charging for the stupendous costs environmental destruction in Europe over the last 5000 years has imposed on the rest of the world, not to mention the consequences of European colonialism and emigration, which kick-started these processes all around the world?
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions. There is no objectively right answer, and that's why there won't be any meaningful agreement on carbon emissions.
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget, the third most populous country is the United States.
Its China and India with their 36.47% of the worlds population, and then the United States with its 4.47%.
Your statement, while correct, is disingenuous in intent. You are using the truth to be dishonest.
This graph spells it out nicely. [wikipedia.org] The United States is on the same line as all less populous countries, while China and India are playing on a completely different field.
The fact that every other country falls on that line says something important about the line, and also says something important about the only two outliers.
Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Hansen would be garner more support from a wider base and generally more acceptance if instead of trying to stop people from doing things he encouraged them to do something...such as invest in nuclear power.
If the AGW crowd expended only half as much energy advocating and educating the public about nuclear power, and how it could solve the AGW problem, as they do with silly stunts and way over the top scenarios (50 feet higher eh?), it would be a win win. CO2 would be cut and we could tell the Oil Tyrants to fuck off and die.
I know that Hansen supports nuclear, including Breeder reactors for waste recycling, but he's not very vocal about it.
People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments, guilt and doomsday predictions.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:1, Insightful)
If Solyndra's any indication of things... It's done NEITHER.
Re:Nuclear (Score:3, Insightful)
You are the reason people push back and you provide the fodder needed for people to say AGW is all about Control.
You don't like people's lifestyles and you want to change them..that's Controlling and AGW is the club you are using to achieve it.
I guarantee you, you will get a great big Fuck You from the majority of people when you take this approach. You will from me anyway.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, apparently, looking at the polls, Fear and doomsday has not worked.
Also, you assume that the nascent nuclear industry (technology wise it is just learning to walk) will not mature. It is not unreasonable to expect far greater efficiency and power output.
Last, if replacing all the fossil fuel power plants with nuclear, which are blamed for the majority of CO2 production, what on else earth do you imagine could be done about it?
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
All of that is paranoid nonsense. Correcting the market distortions introduced by negative externalities by pricing them is a market solution that has been advocated by mainstream economists for nearly a century. I mean really, it's practically Economics 101.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
What are your ideas, other than nuclear? Didn't you say:
People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments
If the price of gas shoots up, and it will (assuming Peak Oil is correct), everyone would quickly forget their umbrage at being "admonished", as suddenly, solutions would be more important. Plus, it's the other way around. Cheap gas has changed our lifestyles. The car is king to an unprecedented degree. Why do all those changes, and the fact they weren't all voluntary [wikipedia.org], get overlooked? We've been manipulated into much of the present day design of our cities. We used to have shopkeepers living above their businesses. Is there any good reason that's no longer acceptable?
One ugly, often unsaid part about all this is status. Car owners like cars because they are a little exclusive. Of course bigger and newer mean higher status. It's such an easy mental shortcut that people like having. Huge parking lots keep unwashed, impoverished pedestrians away from our stores, and that's good because people who don't have cars are more likely to rob! No, of course that wasn't the intention, but people feel that might be one of the effects, and like it. It's similar to the old 55 mph national speed limit in the US. That was passed during the 1970's gas shocks, to save gas, which it does. But then people found it made for safer roads, and some groups tried to keep the national speed limit for that reason.
You think $4/gallon is high? Try $10/gallon! Blame it on the President all you like. Then when you're done uselessly flogging the politicians and the liberals, greens, oil speculators and whomever else you feel might be responsible, think what you're going to do about it. We'd all be wise to prepare for those times. One thing I've done is switched to a plug in electric mower. No battery that way. The cord is of course the big disadvantage, but you learn to work with it. Everything else about the electric mower is a huge plus. Quieter, more efficient, more reliable and durable, no fumes, instant on/off, lower maintenance, cheaper to operate, lighter, and slimmer. It totally blows away the gas powered mower.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:4, Insightful)
Use a carbon tax to make these fuels' cost represent their real cost
Which would be largely meaningless for several reasons. First, the world is currently using almost as much oil as can be pumped out of the ground at maximum rates. There is no longer any significant slack in the world's oil supplies while at the same time there are billions of aspiring consumers in both India and China who are right now in the process of acquiring all of the habits of a western style consumerist lifestyle. This means that any slack in the oil market generated by American or European cutbacks, due to carbon pricing or whatever, will be almost immediately taken up by consumers and industry in China and India. What will be the result of this policy? American and European economies are crippled by higher energy taxes while at the same time no less carbon is emitted because India and China are now burning whatever oil we don't. In fact, it would probably lead to overall worse emissions because vehicles in China in India tend to be older and less efficient designs which belch huge clouds of greasy black smoke from their tailpipes and produce large quantities of photochemical smog. Second, selling energy taxes is like selling austerity and we've all seen how well austerity sells to the public in Europe as a result of the financial meltdown. People really hate being asked to make do with less, especially when government policy forces it upon them. So asking people to cut back and make sacrifices for the climate is basically a non-starter on any meaningful scale. Any workable solution to climate change will have to be almost a drop in replacement for our current energy use or it has basically no chance of being used.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Your right to live your lifestyle ends where my right to live my lifestyle begins. This way you get a great big Fuck You if you want to continue to pollute the environment I have to live in.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:4, Insightful)
PV technology works. My fairly large suburban house would be electrically self-sufficient on a 15 kW PV array. We have 9 kW. The panels, sans subsidy, take about 10 years to pay for themselves. Expanded, to the state-level, that is not an unreasonable figure nor an unreasonable amount time (and these are expensive, high efficiency panels to boot).
But more importantly, solar tech scales well. Solar thermal technology can provide baseload power via thermal storage, and that's just made with mirrors, turbines (from coal plants of all places) and salt. With real government commitment - say, to the the tune of the aforementioned $30 billion that China pumped into it's PV market, the US could easily begin deploying baseload solar with a goal to decommissioning the the now very old nuclear powerplants which it hasn't been replacing to date - it's a political easy win, and solves a number of real problems. It can also be deployed quickly - nuclear plants take 10 years to build.
Proposing "more research" is proposing to do nothing. Research takes 10-15 years to turn into viable manufacturing processes. You need electrical power today. It's also wholly unnecessary though - we have the technology, what we lack is the political will to kick start deployment.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been plenty who've been living like that for decades and most people have not been listening. Aside from Ed Begley, there's Bill Nye, Dennis Weaver, Larry Hagman, etc.
I'm not crazy about Gore being something of a hypocrite but it would be pretty hard, especially when he started, to spread the word without lots of traveling.
But it seems to me that you're only looking for an excuse, a way to not have to change.
What's your tipping point - what ratio of AGW-proponents have to be saintly for you to agree to change? 50%? 99.9999%? 5%? Only the rich ones?
McKibben and Hansen have been walking and talking longer than Gore? Why wasn't that enough for you to change?
And how quickly would you change? What excuse would you latch onto then to change as slowly as possible?