James Hansen on Global Climate Change
Here’s top climate scientist Dr. James Hansen on global climate change. When people ask where I stand on this subject and why, I simply request that they watch this; I sure wish I had it in my power to get everyone to do so.
Not only are we doing nothing to stop this unfolding catastrophe, we’re actively making it worse, subsidizing the fossil fuel industries worldwide with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Why? Big Energy wants it that way, and has spent a fortune to convince voters that putting a tax on carbon to curb our dependence on fossil fuels will hurt the economy. And they’ve been fantastically successful; I had to laugh when I read that the Obama Administration is proudly boasting that the U.S. is producing more gasoline now than in any time in the last eight years. That’s positive leadership for a planet in crisis?
Like Dr. Hansen, I don’t want my grandchildren asking me why I did nothing to stop this, even though I knew it was happening. I hope you’ll check this out.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8]
Craig,
Everything is about perspective. If your grandchildren say “why didn’t you stop this”, and the answer is “we were eliminating poverty and privation”… that’s one thing. If the answer is “we wanted to be sure a few extremely rich people got more rich… well that would be another thing entirely.
The continued expansion of our economy should be a good thing, and energy/carbon taxes are extremely regressive tax systems which would serve to slow growth or even stop growth if the penalties were significant – which they would have to be to have a large effect on our current emissions profile.
Instead of a tax on carbon, why don’t we try implementing a subsidy on non-carbon. In terms of shifting preference from one higher emission choice to a lower emission choice, it would accomplish the exact same thing, but the money would be far less in general and would come from the current progressive tax system – and serve to lower the price of energy and improve the overall competitiveness of U.S. based manufacturing.
All you would have to do is give alternative energy production a subsidy based on your evaluation of the GWP of the emissions that are displaced. So if you assume it’s worth $20 for the country to eliminate one ton of CO2 emissions… you might give $20 for every MWh generated from renewable or nuclear sources at night, and ~$10 for every MWh generated from renewable or nuclear sources during the day.
If you set it so that this subsidy would continue to be collected for the first 5 years of operation, then drop by 10%/year over the following 10 years (so by the 14th year of operation the energy would only get ~$2/MWh during the night and $1/MWh during the day)… you’d see a very significant increase in investment for alternative and nuclear energy… increasing alternative energy build-out by many-fold, without hurting the poor, the middle class, or American industry.
Seems fine to me. Personally, I was intrigued by the simplicity of the suggestion that Hansen provided near the end of his talk: a carbon tax that is distributed immediately and directly back to the people — no net revenue gain or loss, no government bureaucracy.
Craig,
I was advocating that exact tax policy in the 90’s… It’s possible that I may have been the first person to put that forward – if you can believe it in actual hardcopy letters to congressmen and think tanks.
I also blogged about it quite a bit back then. But there is a fatal flaw in the idea: while the individual taxpayers would obviously have a lot more money to spend – far exceeding the extra costs that they would typically incur from driving and consuming electricity… everything that is produced in America would reflect this punishing tax, while everything that is produced abroad would not.
So the taxpayer would receive a large check that would be taken from American manufacturing, but then there would be a financial incentive for that person to spend his/her check on imported goods rather than the American ones…
It would just serve to be one more competitive disadvantage for American industry. It would also serve as a competitive disadvantage for American farms, encouraging us to import more food and making American farmed food less competitive – so it would be hard to export… essentially rather than trading food for fuel we’d be trading food for nothing.
Excellent point. Thanks.
Dr. Hansen has been called a climate science rock star! Here’s a link to a presentation to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
http://2greenenergy.com/dr-james-hansen/21308/
Dr. Hansen describes the Climate Crisis that is occuring now and gives some insight into possible actions for local people to take to encourage their governments to take action to reduce CO2 emmissions.
A rock star indeed. Here’s a guy who received his Ph.D. in physics the year I turned 12. Now, 44 years later he’s getting arrested for protesting about our lack of responsiveness to climate change. That certainly makes an impact on me.