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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."
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Nuclear may or may not be part of the energy solution, but it's hardly the whole thing. You don't solve our transportation by sticking uranium up your car's tailpipes.
Reality and sanity says that we need both to look where we're using oil, and find alternative ways to generate and transport energy to those points of use, how we generate energy at all, and whether there are more efficient ways to do the same things.
Anyone who says "Global warming? Let's just go Nuclear!" is, unfortunately, failing to address 90% of the issues. Which is why you'll find those concerned about global warming don't restrict themselves to a single solution.
I dearly want us to stop banning people from living close to the businesses that serve them, as is common in the US. I want to see better use of available infrastructure, such as rail, to provide access to walkable cities from everywhere. I want more fuel efficient vehicles, and I'd like, ultimately, to see lower cost electric vehicles designed to drive the shorter distances that ought to be more common if we rethink planning policies - I don't know about you, but I don't really need a vehicle that goes for more than 50 miles without {long period of downtime due to recharging} 99% of the time, and would be happy to keep a low cost second vehicle around for those times of journey, yet 99% of the expense of electric vehicles right now has to do with the obsession of making them universal replacements for gasoline vehicles - sticking in redundant gasoline motors, or five times the number of batteries.
And here's the other thing that really bothers me: most of those pushing against global warming or insisting on single solutions are insistent that any solution must protect the status quo. The status quo sucks. 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.
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? Who enjoys being locked in a metal box for an hour or two a day, having to concentrate on nothing except whether that box is between two lines painted on the tarmac? 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?
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? 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?)
You're looking for a positive message? That's because you're not listening! Put in the basic, obvious, solutions that have been proposed for decades, and there's every reason to believe our lives will be more relaxed, our cost of living cheaper, and our options more free.
Nuclear solves 10% of the problem, and isn't a positive or negative solution, any more than windmills or solar is.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.