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

"Level playing field" is a sham

[Dachannien]

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.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[Hatta]

But research just doesn't generate the same number of jobs that a manufacturer can.

Research can provide as many jobs as you have funds.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[jpapon]

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

[Entropius]

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

[BasilBrush]

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.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[Gideon Wells]

There is nothing wrong with being carbon neutral in theory. If every country were carbon neutral the economic benefits would go to those who do it most efficiency without simply resetting your economy to pre-Industrial.

One of the problems is how to implement it. It is almost like arguing over flat, progressive, or recessive taxes*. Make it perfectly neutral between all countries and you hinder the development of... well... developing countries. The developed have a huge advantage and they can keep it. Have a progressive and it puts a larger burden on the developed countries and the developing get economic advantages. Unlike taxes where the stratification between rich, upper-class, middle-class and lower class, we have a developing country as the second largest economy in the world. Another sixth in GDP (Brazil). Two developing countries above Russia and the United Kingdom.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[WaywardGeek]

It is politics as usual, but in this case, Obama is right. If we don't buy their oil, they'll just build a pipeline to the coast and sell it to Japan. In the end, humanity has proven over and over that money wins. Here in NC, there's a battle to keep fracking out. In the end, we'll have fracking here. We'll also open ANWR for oil exploration, because it is expected to increase our very short US oil reserves by 50%. You just can't fight that kind of money. However, opening up all offshore drilling is not expected to increase our oil reserves enough to make any significant difference, so that's just dumb politics.

On the positive side, from a green perspective, none of this oil is cheap. Also, Canada's oil sands companies have figured out how to generate oil much more efficiently, so it's not as dirty as it used to be. Not that they care about pollution, they just want to make more money. Oil sands might help keep oil prices below $200/bbl, which is a good thing, because prices that high would cause global suffering on a huge scale. However, none of the Canada oil is going to keep gas prices below $4/gallon. So, let them drill for it, and build them a pipeline to Texas. Keep fracking out of NC until natural gas prices are so high that voters decide to allow it. Hopefully by then, we'll have figured out how to do fracking safely. And, we need to use this time of permanent high oil prices to ramp up alternatives, like molten salt reactors.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[martin-boundary]

Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.

The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does is grow the economy by introducing a new ficticious form of wealth that can be used as leverage for investment games. It's literally creating wealth out of thin air (and I won't go into how useful that really is).

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[Ambitwistor]

Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.

Nature doesn't, but humans, who are the ones who have to actually do the reducing, do. An arguably effective way for them to do that is for it to be in their financial best interest to do so.

The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does

Who said anything about emissions trading? That's not the only way to make emissions have a cost. Hansen himself favors a tax-and-dividend plan.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[Immerman]

Yes, all gas has the same CO2 content at the pump; HOWEVER, you also need to count all the CO2 released to get it from where it was in the ground to the pump. In the case of tar sands they require an immense amount of high-energy processing which releases far more CO2 than traditional oil distilling does. That's where the extra CO2 cost comes from.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[ShanghaiBill]

Then as research comes up with better ones, the roll out will progress to better technology.

No it won't. Once you start subsidizing manufacturing, you have special interests that want those subsidies to continue. So they block progress. This is already happening. Ethanol from sugar cane is far more efficient to make than ethanol from corn. So we have laws to block it, to "protect" the corn farmers. The Obama administration is also trying to block more cost effective solar panels from China to protect American subsidy sucking manufacturers.

Subsidies for research make sense. Subsidies for manufacturing are an impediment to real progress.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[CodeBuster]

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:"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.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[BasilBrush]

Ethanol is no longer subsidized. That stopped at the beginning of this year. Subsidy did exactly what it was supposed to do. It primed the pump. It got the industry going. Now it's not needed.

There's a tax on foreign ethanol, of any kind, even corn ethanol. But that's just protectionism. And its tax not subsidy.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[davester666]

Summary of summary of debate:

Global Warming is happening.
No, it isn't.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[haruchai]

What does it say when the archive of a CLIMATOLOGIC debate is on an ECONOMICS website.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[Electricity Likes Me]

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:"Level playing field" is a sham

[haruchai]

I fully understand the importance and am very familiar with the issues, from both sides.

But finding a economics site backed by the right-wing Liberty Fund claiming to accurately simmarise the SCIENTIFIC debate is incongruous.

Re:"Level playing field" is a sham

[khallow]

The US dumped a lot more than half a billion. Solyndra wasn't the only recipient. What's noteworthy about Solyndra is that it was already failing hard at the time of the loan, with or without the Chinese. There was no sane reason to keep lending money to them.

New Global Warming Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame Canada!

The problem no one will mention

[hessian]

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.

Re:The problem no one will mention

[bogjobber]

Do you have any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of beef?

Re:The problem no one will mention

[Issarlk]

So if I understand well, eating the vegetables ourselves is unsustainable. But feeding animals with them, then eating the meat is somehow sustainable?

Sorry but something doesn't adds up here.

Re:The problem no one will mention

[drinkypoo]

If we were all vegetarian, we'd starve until the seas rose.

What? If we ate more efficiently, we'd starve until the seas came up and rendered the land unable to support crops for five years across the affected area? Whatchoo talkin' bout, willis?

There isn't enough arable land for that to hold up

Maybe not with bullshit "Green Revolution" agriculture designed to provide windfalls to pesticide and fertilizer companies, which destroys the land on which it used, killing off the biological components of the soil. More people are going to have to pick crops until we figure out how to do it with robots, but as it turns out, if you interplant (for example) plants which need nitrogen with plants which fix nitrogen, it all works out a lot better. Indeed, it is possible to produce more food per acre by simply interplanting, and as well, the food is more nutritious as the soil contains the trace elements that we like to find in our food. And you can do it without tilling.

Have you any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of soya?

None whatsoever is required but a great deal is used.

Re:The problem no one will mention

[maxwell demon]

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.

Re:The problem no one will mention

[dadioflex]

I love subtle humour as much as the next guy. Not enough arable land? Priceless.

Besides we can always eat insects, algae, people, fungi. The list is end- what? I said we can eat insects, algae and fungi. Jeeze. Why are you looking at me like that?

Re:The problem no one will mention

[Rockoon]

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. 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.

Re:The problem no one will mention

[Velex]

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...

Again.

[SuricouRaven]

Every political debate about climate change countermeasures comes down to the same fundamental conflict:

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:A market problem needs a market solution

[Fished]

Errr... that should have been "Carbon dioxide emissions." I'm smoking a cigarette, so I guess I have carbon monoxide on my brain.

at least one libertarian likes this idea

[Trepidity]

Jonathan Adler agrees, and thinks Hansen's proposal is a viable market-based approach, and better than the cap-and-trade approaches that have been getting more press.

The bigger issue

[hessian]

That's a good point. What I said was that even if we cut emissions to the bare minimum by living in mud huts, subsistence farming, etc. we're not going to be able to stop carbon emissions.

If we visualize this as an equation:

P x R = I

Population times average Resource use equals total Impact.

Then we can see that if we decrease R, but raise P, we cancel out any benefits gained.

Even more, there's another variable, which is the only truly fixed commodity we have -- the open land that replenishes our water, air, etc. and filters out toxins.

P x R = I - F

If we reduce the amount of Forest, we have more impact. There is also a minimum amount of Forest below which we start losing natural species and living in a toxic gasmasks-required Fallout 3 type world.

So he wants Imperialism...

[CajunArson]

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.

It's just nuts

[Johann Lau]

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:It's just nuts

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Solar power satellites are the way forward, I am convinced of it.

let's level it for real then

[khipu]

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.

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: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:let's level it for real then

[khipu]

If we accept the ethical idea that âoethe polluter should payâ then we should ask how big is each countryâ(TM)s historical footprint. Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winnersâ(TM) 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.

You have the right idea, but you are not doing the accounting right. The state atmosphere doesn't depend on per capita emissions or how much people earn, it depends on total accumulated carbon. And that is the result of the balance of both emissions and capture. So, to determine how much to charge each country, you need to take the discounted historical emissions and the discounted historical carbon capture.

But it gets worse. Europe started out 90% forested, and is down to less than 10% these days. Those forests used to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere for the entire world. Did Europeans even have the right to chop those trees down, impacting the carbon balance for the entire planet? Maybe, for each nation, we shouldn't use the difference between emissions and capture to calculate charges, but the difference between emissions and original capture rate prior to human-caused deforestation.

This isn't just a question of ethics, it's a question of what incentives we give. Charging for per-capita emissions or just total emissions won't work, it will simply result in countries gaming the system in various ways. But doing the accounting correctly would be so costly for Europe that Europeans are simply not going to go for it. Hence, nothing is going to happen, other than a lot of finger pointing.

Nuclear

[sycodon]

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:Nuclear

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Nuclear

[sycodon]

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

[sycodon]

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

[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:Nuclear

[WillDraven]

I dearly want us to stop banning people from living close to the businesses that serve them, as is common in the US.[...] poor zoning policies, [...] because we've gone out of our way to partition off neighborhoods from businesses

This sounds like a good idea in theory, until the crab shack next door has dollar margarita live music Wednesdays and you have work early Thursday morning. The problem is, you either can ban businesses from residential neighborhoods, place heaps of restrictions on businesses in said neighborhoods, or deal with all your citizens complaining of those other types of pollution, noise and light, at every town meeting.

The good news for you is that zoning laws are typically a locally controlled thing. If you can find enough people who prefer one of the lesser used options you are free to either start your own town or move into an existing one in significant numbers to become the voting majority.

The problem being of course that most of the people who don't mind noise and light during the night already live in such places: cities with high rise apartments with shops on the ground level. If this is the model you prefer, vote with your wallet and move into such a building.

Re:Nuclear

[wealthychef]

Yes, it includes that energy of course; any scheme to combat climate change must. In order to address climate change, we have to move off fossil fuels, right? The good news is that we can continue to burn hydrocarbons, if we create them using solar energy in a pseudo-photosynthetic process. Again, I claim that the biggest impediment (other than that my proposed technology does not exist yet) is that uneducated people think climate change is not a settled "theory," kind of like evolution and the big bang. It's just way too scientific and "out there" to be real. Gotta keep those hamster wheels turning!

Re:Nuclear

[Ambitwistor]

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

[NeutronCowboy]

Because nuclear isn't a silver bullet, no matter how often you claim it. France, the country with probably the most experience running a commercial breeder reactor, has still not found a way to make it reliable and economically self-sustaining. Regular nuclear has its own set of problem (yes, even thorium reactors), and ultimately, is also a stop-gap.

Finally, I think it's hilarious that the carbon tax is now some devilish plot, when in the late 80s and early 90s, was the tool recommended by conservatives and economists as the free market solution to global warming. For anyone wondering who the hell was talking about Global Warming in the 80s: that would be the world outside the US.

People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments, guilt and doomsday predictions.

And people take your complaints seriously if you don't throw a hissy fit every time the solution proposed has even the slightest negative impact on you.

On a side note: I find it interesting that over the weekend, anti-AGW comments are regularly upmodded over AGW comments. During the week, however, the inverse is true.

Re:Nuclear

[CodeBuster]

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

It's called Zoning, look it up sometime.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Nuclear

[bzipitidoo]

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, 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:Nuclear

[chrb]

It takes 15 Terawatts to power the world [wikipedia.org] and each fission reactor apparently provides about 1 gigawatt [euronuclear.org], so to furnish 50% of the world's energy needs of today with nuclear, we'd need to build 1 billion nuclear fission reactors.

Your math is wrong. 15*10^12 / 1*10^9 = 15000 reactors. The estimate I've read is lower, 3000 new reactors over 60 years, i.e. 50 new reactors a year globally, which might be acheivable. See Sustainable energy without the hot air, chapter 24: Nuclear: Mythconceptions

I heard that nuclear power can’t be built at a sufficient rate to make a useful contribution.

The difficulty of building nuclear power fast has been exaggerated with the help of a misleading presentation technique I call “the magic playing field.” In this technique, two things appear to be compared, but the basis of the comparison is switched halfway through. The Guardian’s environment editor, summarizing a report from the Oxford Research Group, wrote “For nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3000 new reactors – or about one a week for 60 years. A civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate is 3.4 new reactors a year.” 3000 sounds much bigger than 3.4, doesn’t it! In this application of the “magic playing field” technique, there is a switch not only of timescale but also of region. While the first figure (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is the number required for the whole planet, the second figure (3.4 new reactors per year) is the maximum rate of building by a single country (France)!

A more honest presentation would have kept the comparison on a per- planet basis. France has 59 of the world’s 429 operating nuclear reactors, so it’s plausible that the highest rate of reactor building for the whole planet was something like ten times France’s, that is, 34 new reactors per year. And the required rate (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is 50 new reactors per year. So the assertion that “civil nuclear construction on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible” is poppycock. Yes, it’s a big construction rate, but it’s in the same ballpark as historical construction rates.

How reasonable is my assertion that the world’s maximum historical construction rate must have been about 34 new nuclear reactors per year? Let’s look at the data. Figure 24.14 shows the power of the world’s nuclear fleet as a function of time, showing only the power stations still operational in 2007. The rate of new build was biggest in 1984, and had a value of (drum-roll please...) about 30 GW per year – about 30 1-GW reactors. So there!

Re:Nuclear

[dunkelfalke]

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:Nuclear

[HornWumpus]

Bullshit.

In the US fuel taxes pay for 100% of roads AND subsidize mass transit.

The only way you can claim gas is subsidized it by claiming fuel taxes should pay for 100% of the US military. All businesses count expenses when calculating net profit, so shove that claim before making it.

I've seen green websites count taxes on fuel that are used to pay for roads as a fuel subsidy. When you are dealing with people that dishonest you have to watch them for Bullshit constantly.

Re:Nuclear

[SuperGlide]

Math fail. 15 terawatts = 15,000 gigawatts. So, to provide half of 15 terawatts, 7,500 fission reactors would be required. But what's a factor of 133,333 anyway.

Re:Nuclear

[Electricity Likes Me]

The refrigerator you can buy today, compared to the 1970s, is 3 times as large, and uses a 1/3rd the electricity.

Any sustainability proposal that begins by assuming people must have less, isn't really a sustainability proposal at all - and besides, any proposal that starts with "people should act different" is already irrelevant. We have a lot of experience with where that road leads us.

Re:Nuclear

[haruchai]

Don't kid yourself - the denialist camp, at all levels, is full of people who fit that description

Re:Nuclear

[haruchai]

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?

In context

[J'raxis]

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.

Let's put this alarmist prediction into context:

James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books -- mine included -- because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace.

Re:In context

[J'raxis]

Either the globalwarmers are guilty of an "appeal to false authority" for supporting this guy, or now we've got the "no true Scotsman" fallacy on our hands when they're repudiating him.

Isn't hypocrisy fun? :D

Let's just fix this problem

[lexsird]

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.

Re:Let's just fix this problem

[Immerman]

Actually, while trees and other land-dwelling plants certainly help, just like with oxygen production most of the heavy lifting is done by the oceans - atmospheric CO2 dissolves in the water and gets used by diatoms, algae, and plankton, which then die and carry their sequestered carbon to the ocean floor.

And when it comes to hemp roadblocks, don't forget the lumber industry which wouldn't be very profitable if hemp replaced wood waste for paper making and other uses, and the pharmaceutical industry which is none too pleased about the panacea of useful compounds found in hemp. I hadn't heard of the nutrient-leaching problem, but I doubt it's much worse than with cotton or other soil-destroying crops and could probably be handled similarly, with fertilizers or intelligent crop rotation. Talk to the folks currently farming it in other countries, I'm sure they've got it all worked out.

Re:Let's just fix this problem

[rrohbeck]

The biosphere is mostly carbon neutral. Carbon that gets scrubbed out by plants is released back into the atmosphere by burning or rotting except for the small fraction that is buried (and forms fossil fuel in the long term.)
Growing trees does not make a difference. Actively burying carbon would (biochar for example) but that takes more energy than you want to think of, so it's more efficient to not burn the carbon in the first place.

Re:It will be mined

[Ambitwistor]

I have to say that the pro-warming side lost a lot of credibility with me when they started trying to slander their opponents with the word "denier'

Those on the side of evolution apply the same term to creationists. Do you therefore disbelieve evolution too? Or are you willing to accept, maybe, that labels people use have nothing to do with scientific credibility? Accusations of tribalism aside, is it really a secret even to someone "not heavily immersed in the science" that the scientific literature overwhelmingly supports anthropogenic global warming?

"Hide the decline"

[TapeCutter]

If the trees and temps don't jive now, then why is it valid to say they jived a thousand years ago?

If you throw out the enitire TR proxy the results are virtually the same as only throwing out the divergent part. This in itself strongly suggests the "good" part of the proxy does indeed correlate well with the average of the other proxies wich in turn correlate with instrumental records and/or isotopic 'clocks'. As you say the TR proxy diverges from the instrumental record after the 1950's, and it's unknown why this is so, but it doesn't change the reconstruction in any meaningful way.

You should always consult the primary source, especially when the subject is AGW. If you haven't read the hockey stick paper and it's 2005(?) follow up, then do so, they list the proxies and discuss the tree ring problem. Proxy data sets can be found at Nasa's paleoclimate data repository. I think you'll find there are more than a "few samples" in the 3377 TR data sets they have on their books. Yes, data SETS, not data points.

Speaking of sources, you may want to try running your bullshit detector over the primary source that led you into this well known cul-de-sc of irrelevant trivia.