Speaking Our Peace The Lilliputians
& the Giant
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Copenhagen: Games People Play
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Volunteer Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Goin' Broke Essay Winners
 Goin' Broke The Cost of War
 NFP Sticker Get Your FREE
NFP Bumper Sticker!
Just send us an Email.

NASA Scientist Jim Hansen Takes on 'Big Coal'

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, always has been a scientist who operates with an uncommon dose of conscience. Lately, Hansen has been stepping up his battle against coal-generated power. He personally went to the barricades and was hauled off to jail with 30 activists in a protest of ‘mountain-top’ removal mining in West Virginia on June 23. Charged with obstructing officers and impeding traffic, Hansen soon was citing Mahatma Gandhi on the difference between civil disobedience and civil resistance.

Hansen says that shutting down coal-fired power until emissions can be removed will provide a major impediment to global warming — perhaps the most crucial solution of all. As a side-benefit, reducing use of coal will reduce coal mining, including the new style of strip mining that blasts the tops off mountains and sifts the debris for fuel. Coal-mining and power interests stand in the way, however. “If governments continue to abdicate their responsibility to citizens in favor of special interests,” Hansen says, “It [civil resistance] seems essential. Strength comes from realization of rightness of course.”

In addition, Hansen has pointedly criticized the Waxman-Markey ‘cap-and-trade’ carbon reduction bill being debated on Capitol Hill because it allows construction of new coal-fired power plants. As for the support many major environmental groups have given to the bill, Hansen said. “This is just stupidity on the part of environmental organizations in Washington. The fact that some of these organizations have become part of the Washington ‘go along, get along’ establishment is very unfortunate.” He points out that the bill still allows new coal-fired power as well as strip-mining of mountain peaks, which Hansen calls “blasphemy” — not a scientific term, but it gets the point across.

Fee and Dividend

Equally adamantly, Hansen believes that cap-and-trade will be useless in the long-run battle against global warming. “The fundamental reason that we do not switch to cleaner energies is that fossil fuels remain the cheapest energy source, as long as they do not have to pay for their costs to society,” Hansen wrote recently. “We already should have been making fossil fuels pay for the damage they cause to human health and the environment. But now that we understand the climate implications of fossil fuel use, and recognizing that it is necessary to move beyond fossil fuels at some point anyhow, it is essential that we put a price on carbon emissions to make that transition occur sooner, in an economically efficient way.”

Hansen favors a direct “carbon fee” applied uniformly to all oil, gas and coal at the source, at the first sale at the mine or port of entry. His plan would then return a share of that fee to people on a monthly basis in the form of electronic deposits in bank accounts or on debit cards. The fee should increase gradually to exert downward pressure on production of greenhouse gases, and be large enough to affect purchasing decisions.

Measured by 2007 fossil-fuel use in the United States, such a fee, Hansen calculates, would generate $670 billion — a dividend for each adult resident of almost $3,000 per year. Allowing $1,500 per child (two per family), a likely family rebate would total $9,000 to offset rising prices that would be levied by companies paying the tax. The idea is to reward production that reduces greenhouse-gas production.

“The carbon fee would provide a strong incentive to replace inefficient infrastructure. It would spur the economy,” Hansen states. Financial incentives would spur new building, appliance and vehicle efficiency standards. It also could provide an incentive to move to ever-higher energy efficiencies and carbon-free energy sources. Furthermore, Hansen said, “It would spur innovation. In this fee and rebate approach, a tipping point would be reached as energy efficiency and carbon-free energies become cheaper than fossil fuels. We would then transition rapidly to the era beyond fossil fuels.” Such an approach also would retain money inside the country as transportation becomes more energy-efficient.

Cap-and-Trade: A Tax

Cap-and-trade, is also a tax, says Hansen, but one more likely to direct profits to “millionaires on Wall Street and other trading floors at public expense,” as they manipulate the new market, providing “an invitation to blackmail by utilities that threaten ‘blackout coming’ to gain increased emission permits.”

“The truth,” said Hansen “is [that] the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course.” Most importantly, Hansen believes that cap-and-trade, a product of special interests, will be subject to delay, so it will not solve the problem. It may slow emissions, but because of the long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, merely reducing the rate of increase does little good. The proportion of carbon dioxide in the air must fall from the present level (about 387 parts per million) to 350 p.p.m. or lower.

Hansen acknowledges that some environmental leaders suggest that he is naïve to think that an alternative exists to cap-and-trade. “They suggest that I should stick to climate modeling,” Hansen said. However, he continued, “Their contention is that it is better to pass any bill now and improve it later. Their belief that they, as opposed to the fossil interests, have more effect on the bill’s eventual shape seems to be the pinnacle of naïveté.”

Hansen has his eye on the future of the Earth, not on expediency. “The proper course of action is clear, from the science and common sense. The geophysical boundary conditions dictate a course that causes coal emissions to be phased out expeditiously — although not necessarily coal use. There should be an immediate halt to construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture all emissions, including carbon dioxide. Mountaintop removal, with its blasphemous environmental damage, should be banned… We should move rapidly to terminate coal use except where all emissions are captured. The truth is that the climate problem cannot be solved without taking on special interests, specifically the coal industry.”

Bruce E. Johansen is a professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and author, in 2009, of Hot Air and Hard Science: Dissecting the Global Warming Debate and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology.