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."
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong here is the feeding of the cows with soya. In the former times, cows were eating grass which isn't eatable by humans and grows in places not useful for agriculture. In other words, they made additional resources available.
Let's just fix this problem (Score:4, Interesting)
We aren't going to stop using whatever kind of oil we find, obviously. So we need to clean up this carbon out of the air. Classically, nature does this for us but we seem to have overloaded that mechanism. Trees have been the acme of biological agents for scrubbing the air, but we need a new one.
We need a plant that grows fast, and by growing and producing it's seeds/fruit it consumes a lot of carbon. We have just such a perfect candidate, but leave it to politics to forbid it. I am talking about hemp. Hemp has the bulk and the seed production that will yank carbon out of the air by the scruff of it's neck. It grows small tree tall in a single season and it sucks so much carbon that the seeds are teaming with a hydrocarbon.
Historically, it's a weed that farmers hate because it leaches soil quickly of nutrients. To me this isn't a problem with modern hydroponics. We have plenty of recyclable products and our own sewer to feed a hydroponic system that would feed these hemp plants. It would process waste and carbon into a plant that has more uses than I can count.
With hydroponics, lots of real estate that is worthless to build on can be used for hemp patches, piping a rich slurry to feed them, processing our own waste. We don't need to cut into crop lands, hence the "leaching" effect can be controlled.
Of course there are roadblocks to this solution. The cotton industry has been an enemy of hemp, mostly out of fear that it will replace them. Of course we have the anti-drug crowd that will insist that hippies are going to smoke it. Counters to that are that is creates new industry and innovations from a very "green" resource that is not only renewable, but it helps scrub the air. Everyone wins. Except for the hippies who tried to smoke it, who are wreathing in agony from a "ditch weed" headache.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure he will, but so what?
I currently live in an area where a single large company has 10,000+ employees on the roads every daytime shift change. I've talked to a number of those people as a financial counselor, trying to help them with debt problems, usually the ones with severe, almost impossible debt problems, (and getting paid for it). I focus much more on tax related work than counseling, because so many of the financially strapped cases want nothing but free, painless solutions, and unless I pick cases very carefully, I would get nothing but customers who simply can't be satisfied. At least, anyone who badmouths me because the IRS didn't buy their story that they forgot the dog wasn't human before they claimed him doesn't scare other customers away too much, but I've had cases where I've been badmouthed for, just for example, telling a person with a 28,000 $ a year job and 375,000 $ in credit card debt that no, continuing to pay off credit cards with other credit cards was not going to get them out of the hole.
In this process, I keep running across people who live outside the city limits and put up with taking an hour or more of bumper to bumper rush hour traffic to get to their suburb every single working day. They give me excuses such as the in city property taxes being too high, and I find out they are spending 2,000 $ a year on gas and such to avoid 500 $ a year in property taxes, plus sending their kids to inferior schools, dealing with the stress of double or triple commute times in a really bad traffic environment, and often getting much poorer services (such as septic tanks instead of a sewer system). I've shown people wherte they can literally cut their costs by 20% or more by moving into a particular location inside the city and nearer their job, or make such a move pay for itself. Often, these people's debt issues are so great such a move would pay for itself in less than a single year. And I've had some of those people literally say "Fuck You". I'm sorry, but at some point, reality is what's doing the controlling. It's not a case of whether I like some people's lifestyles or not - It's a case of reality itself doesn't like those choices.
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, good grief. Really?
News flash. Women want to have children, and we've designed all kinds of things like child support and welfare to encourage them to be able to exercise exactly zero forethought before going to a party, doing a bunch of drugs, getting knocked up, then calling date rape once their pregnancy test comes back positive.
If anybody cared about gender equality, a woman who had children with no way to support them would be shunned the exact same way as a deadbeat dad, and instead we'd have some way to either let the children starve or just take them away from her.
I keep getting told I'm trolling, so either I'm in a parallel universe or men need to start opening their eyes and seeing what's happening around them.
It's not homosexuals who are destroying marriage, it's women.
I work around a lot of women, and I see this consistently. When one of them gets pregnant, it's always outside of marriage. Either it's date rape or otherwise the father to be mysteriously turns into a total jackass around the 5th month of pregnancy (give or take a month). The benefits to a woman for making the baby's father out to be a complete creep creates quite the conflict of interest there.
Every now and then I'm flabbergasted to learn that one of these pregnancies happened within marriage. Then these exact same women turn around and parrot everything fox news has to say about homosexuality. It's completely hypocritical, and nobody has a problem with it. I can accept that perhaps homosexuals are abominations before god, but I'm pretty sure the scriptual basis for that also says that women having children outside of wedlock or even having children with two different men is equally abominable.
I'm sure that was part of the point you were trying to make, but let's face it. As a homosexual property owner, I'm forced to cough up tax money both from my income and for my property, and all I can do is helplessly watch as it's given to women who, beside being able to have babies, have no skills or any other way to support themselves. If that's how they want to be, then fine. They can get a husband, because I sure as hell don't want to pay for them to be able to freeload.
Or, if they really, really want to have children without involving a man for anything other than a one night stand, then they can do the responsible thing and advance themselves to a job that will pay them enough to be able to support themselves and their child. I know in an intellectual sense that females are capable of reading, writing, and math, but we have a system that lets them play the victim card and go the easy route instead of doing something they want us to believe that is just too hard like basic algebra.
But, nobody cares. Women just play the victim card over and over again, and men are perfectly happy to play along with it. I can only wonder if men who legitimize inherent victimhood for women are really so delusional as to believe that they're going to get pussy for being a white knight saving the damsel in distress.
Sickening. Simply sickening. Oh well, countdown to being modded -1 troll or offtopic for talking about the elephant in the room in 5... 4... 3...