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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."
Blame Canada!
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?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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.
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.
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.