NASA's Hansen Calls Out Obama On Climate Change

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."

Comments

Re:Nuclear

[cayenne8]

I dearly want us to stop banning people from living close to the businesses that serve them, as is common in the US.

Ban? Care to elaborate on this? I know of no bans or even any regulation on where you can live?

My energy usage is high not because I want it to be, but because of poor zoning policies, crappy offerings from transportation businesses, and so on.

Well, we're pretty much stuck working with what we have. I mean, where are you planning to get the massive funding, to tear up the current cities and their infrastructure, to 're-do' it into a properly organized and planned and laid out way of life for us all to live 1 block from work, and have all our groceries delivered, etc? Not getting into the common things of people changing jobs every few years and not wanting to sell the house and move just to be closer to the new job (would we need to average the distance between couples that both work?)

Even if gas was back to a dollar a gallon as it was under Clinton, I don't _want_ to fucking drive everywhere. Who the hell does?

I do, that's why I drive sports cars...I've never owned any car with more that 2 seats in my life (ok, the Porsche turbo technically was a 4-seater, but you couldn't even really fit one kid back there for more than a couple blocks).

Who likes the fact they can't really go for a drink after work or, well, easily socialize anyway, because of the requirements and boundaries set by reliance on motor vehicles?

???

Nothing stops me from having a drink after work and socializing...nor does it stop any of my friends. I mean, do you not see those bars on the way home with very large parking lots that are filled with cars? Those lots aren't filled up by employees of the establishment.

Does everyone actually like the fact their property and sales taxes are high despite the complete lack of the public services, solely because of the costs of maintaining many times the lengths of roads necessary because we've gone out of our way to partition off neighborhoods from businesses?

Err...those roads and all are paid for by fuel taxes...I don't know that any of my property or sales tax goes for my roads. Even if some of it did, no...it isn't that bad. I like having the independence to go where I want when I want, and not have to sit waiting for a fucking bus in the rain, heat, humidity...and take hours to get back and forth (which takes minutes in my own car)...and try to haul all my groceries on/off multiple busses while sitting next to a smelly bum...and then, figuring some way to carry the load of stuff home from the nearest bus stop which is about 1/2 a mile away easily. I frankly dunno how I could carry all my groceries on said public transport. Hell, I have to usually make 3-4 trips at least to carry them into the house from my car in the garage. Geez, what about families that have to feed 3-4 mouths? That would really be impossible, unless you are saying you want to force everyone to take time out of their day to shop daily....

What about the cost of food and other essentials? (Why is it about half the price in Britain than in the US, despite much higher taxes and much lower subsidies in the UK?)

I'm not sure where you get your stats. On my cooking lists, I'm often shocked how much my friends in the UK and other EU countries say their food is compared to ours here in the US.

Re:let's level it for real then

[chrb]

Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions.

The obvious answer to the question "who should pay for emissions?" is "the people who did it". You are, for some reason, attempting to lump in lots of other environmental issues to the one of CO2 emissions. When we regulated SO2 emissions, we just did it - we didn't wait until we had figured out how to handle deforestation or population growth in Africa, or how to somehow "correct" the effects of colonialism or emigration in Europe thousands of years ago.

If you don't think that the emitter should pay, then who should? The rich? The poor? Everyone pay an equal share? If so, how do you account for different salary rates in different nations - should everyone pay an equal proportion of their income? It is ridiculous to suggest that, say, Africans with their average income of $315 a year should have the same responsibility towards paying this cost as Westerners who earn many times more, especially when it was the Western nations who contributed most to the increase in co2 levels:

The major countries with the biggest per-capita emissions are Australia, the USA, and Canada. European countries, Japan, and South Africa are notable runners up. Among European countries, the United Kingdom is resolutely average. What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.

So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.

Historical responsibility for climate impact

If we assume that the climate has been damaged by human activity, and that someone needs to x it, who should pay? Some people say “the polluter should pay.” The preceding pictures showed who’s doing the polluting today. But it isn’t the rate of CO2 pollution that matters, it’s the cumulative total emissions; much of the emitted carbon dioxide (about one third of it) will hang around in the atmosphere for at least 50 or 100 years. If we accept the ethical idea that “the polluter should pay” then we should ask how big is each country’s historical footprint. The next picture shows each country’s cumulative emissions of CO2, expressed as an average emission rate over the period 1880–2004. Average pollution rate

Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[sixsixtysix]

you do realize why Solyndra failed, dont you? after the u.s. government invested $500 million in loans in solar tech, china went and invested $30 billion in loans for solar tech. game over, man.