James Hansen
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Stealing home: James Hansen’s audacious battle to save the planet
My gut reaction to all new sustainable business and climate change books is: “Eck. Get me some Percocet and vodka.” I already know what they’re going to say: the business books say green is green, sustainability is profitable, and here are some examples. The climate book says we are hosed, and we are going to […]
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A messy but practical strategy for phasing out the U.S. coal fleet
By 2030, we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases from coal. That conclusion is most famously associated with NASA’s climate chief James Hansen, but Hansen is not alone. In a recent paper, nine other climate scientists — David Beerling, Robert Berner, Pushker Kharecha, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Paganini, Maureen Raymo, Dana Royer, Makiko Sato, and James […]
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The Climate Post: Melting ice makes slippery slope
First things first: Several high-profile exits from the climate conversation — Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) from the Senate; BP, Caterpillar, and ConocoPhillips, from USCAP; and chief climate negotiator Yvo de Boer from the U.N. — were widely reported this week. None of these stories carry as much long-term significance as the under-reported-on difficulty of many major […]
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We’re kicking butt on coal
Bummed out about Copenhagen, the U.S. Senate, that expensive-sounding kggrstch emanating from somewhere in your transmission? Well, here’s some good news to sip and enjoy: the amazing success of the fight to stop new coal plants. Consider the situation in early 2007. At that time the Energy Department released a survey showing 151 new coal […]
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Obama’s nuclear generation gap
During the energy portion of his first State of the Union address last week, President Obama called for “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” That raises a question: Exactly what generation of nuclear power is Obama talking about — and what makes it an improvement over the generation […]
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James Hansen vs. cap-and-trade
NASA climate scientist James Hansen has a new book out about climate policy, with excerpts in this month’s issue of The Nation. And in my view, he’s got a pretty good policy idea: tax carbon, and use the revenue to give out rebates in equal, per capita shares to every U.S. citizen. It’s a twofer […]
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NASA climate scientist should come back to earth
Eric’s take on Jim Hansen’s opposition to cap and trade is exactly right. Hansen is a renowned NASA climate scientist. But on climate policy, he’s just lost in space. Now, I’m not going to call Hansen’s support for carbon taxes misguided. Remember, we LIKE carbon taxes. We’ve given BC’s pathbreaking carbon tax lots of sloppy […]
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Shared fate under the ‘fault lines’
We hear plenty about the divisions that make reaching a global climate agreement in Copenhagen daunting. “Negotiators at Climate Talks Face Deep Set of Fault Lines,” as the New York Times put it on Sunday. Indeed, the opening salvos from the negotiators confirm that they have a long way to go in less than 2 […]
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How James Hansen gets cap-and-trade wrong
Climate scientist James Hansen has gone on the warpath against cap-and-trade. (See this op-ed in the NYT, among other recent examples.) Perhaps what’s most alarming is that, for all his intelligence, Hansen doesn’t appear to grasp even the basic elements of cap-and-trade systems. In a blog post last weekend, economist Paul Krugman took him to task: … […]
