(Night photo of coal-fired power plant in Ohio from Flickr and and photographer Daniel Shea
Washington Report: NASA scientist James Hansen, who first warned Congress about global warming exactly 20 years ago, testified Monday a new administration and Congress must make a “transformational” energy change next year or be plunged into catastrophic, unstoppable climate change.
The main points of his statement, published in advance in The Guardian in England:
• CO2 in the atmosphere must be reduced and kept below 350 parts per million to avoid climate change disaster (it is now at 385 ppm and the Lieberman-Warner bill targeted 450).
• The first requirement is to halt use of coal unless the CO2 is captured and stored. He called for a moratorium on new plants that don’t do that.
• A price on emissions is essential. A carbon tax, with all the money going back to the public in the form of a “dividend,” would be best, he said, with a full share to every adult and half-share to children.
• Fossil fuel CEOs have known about the damage CO2 was doing, but like the tobacco companies, encouraged doubt about a link to global warming. “In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
• The next President must make a low-loss electricity grid a priority, so renewable energy can replace fossil fuels for power generation.
• Fossil fuel interests must be blocked from squeezing every last drop of oil from public lands, offshore and wilderness areas. It will only delay the real change that is needed to avoid a tipping point.
The tipping point has already been reached in the Arctic, Hansen said, and regardless of new emissions, summer sea ice will disappear. The risk now is passing a tipping point in West Antarctica and Greenland, which will rise the seas if they melt. Without a big change, he predicted a sea level increase of 2 meters (6 feet) by century’s end, which would bring constantly unstable shorelines and hundreds of millions of refugees.
Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Congress June 23, 1988, that the world was warming, that the cause was man-made, and that it would lead to erratic weather with floods, droughts and wildfires. Some call him a prophet and some have said he is “nuts.”
This week Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), R-Okla., said, "Hansen, Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."
Hansen has suggested he might campaign against some of the obstructionists in Congress. Inhofe is facing a challenge this year from Democrat Andrew Rice in Oklahoma.
(Sources: The Guardian, ClimateWire,
EnvironmentalLeader.com, Associated Press)
