How Not to Solve Climate Change

James Hansen
Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

"Keep doing exactly what the U.S. Government is doing and you’re off to a perfect start." The NASA climatologist explains why the cap-and-trade proposal only represents the interests of the polluters and will not work.

Will the cap-and-trade proposal curb emissions?

James Hansen: Yeah. You know, Obama is still perhaps our best hope, but he's going to have to study this problem and understand it. Presently, his approach is to let Congress debate it and make their horse trading, and end up with some sort of compromises with the polluters. And then we end up with this cap-and-trade and offsets, and a completely ineffective system. But this situation, in which we can see what we are doing to future climate and what the implications will be for young people -- we're in danger of sending them into a situation where dynamical system will be out of their control. But this -- the intergenerational injustice of that is -- this problem is analogous to that faced by Abraham Lincoln with slavery, or Winston Churchill with Nazism. It's not a problem where you can compromise. Lincoln couldn't say, well, let's reduce the slaves by 50 percent. You can't compromise on this; we have to phase out the carbon dioxide emission over the next several decades. And frankly, that means phasing out coal emissions. And this cap-and-trade system doesn’t do it at all.

Question: Why do you feel many politicians support the bill?

James Hansen: Well, they are -- they're taking the easy way out. They're allowing the polluters to write the bill. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House is 2,000 pages long. Do you think that Representative Waxman wrote this? No, this is written by the polluters; and even by environmentalists -- there are good points in those bills also. It's filled with the polluters' point of view and some environmental things to increase solar power, for example. But that's not going to solve the problem. It's just like the old Kyoto Protocol approach. They have to face the fundamental issue: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, then they are going to be burned, and their use will continue to increase. You have to face it. That's what the lawmakers are not facing, and that's what President Obama has got to understand. So the only way you can address that is by putting a rising price on the carbon emissions. Then the alternatives -- the renewable energies, energy efficiency, nuclear power, anything that doesn't produce carbon -- will compete more effectively, and those which are most effective will begin to win economically.

Question: Do you feel anybody in Washington sees this?

James Hansen: Yes, there are people in Washington who get it. There is one bill that

was introduced in the House which had a gradually increasing carbon price. The Democratic Party -- it was introduced by a Democrat, and I'm sorry I can't think of his name of the moment -- but it was conveniently ignored by the Democratic Party. We've got to have an open discussion of this. I think the public is not excited about this issue the way they were about health care. But we need to have that kind of an open discussion so that we see what the alternatives are, because this approach that is being pushed by the Democratic Party is a disaster. 

All we want are better living standards, so we decide to burn fossil fuels and deforest our planet, which in the end create worst living standards on a global scale; however, the scale at which it worsens globally is slower than the immediate rise in short term living standards.

In focussing on Climate Change Deniers, more heat than light emerges. I don’t see much discussion of the real issue: which is, taking the Change as a given, is it potentially under human control, as the current debate seems to assume, or is the human contribution a minor part, in which case even our successful “solutions” , like burning NO carbon ,would be useless. I gather indirectly that there is really no scientific consensus about this point; I wish it were discussed more. It’s going to cost a lot of effort in either case, but it would be good to have more information on just how wasteful our efforts are.. Case in point: Ethanol: a totally useless program, is it not?