McKibben (Green Institute) and Hansen (NASA) speak up
9/28/2006
The Presidents plan… clear nail polish on Godzilla
By: Bill McKibben
September 25, 2006
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Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and the forthcoming Deep Economy. He is a scholar in residence at
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After almost two decades of inaction, at long last
Not too quickly, mind you—Thursday's announcement from the White House that
their new climate plan consists of a few billion dollars in odds and
ends, mostly to help build a few reactors, was about as tiny a sop as
one could imagine. Pressed for a moonshot-style program to lift us
toward renewable energy, the president offered a cherry bomb in a tin
can.
His announcement was apparently designed to undercut Bill Clinton's call for international action on global warming this week. And it came a few days after Al Gore's truly landmark speech —the missing reel from the end of An Inconvenient Truth
—in which he became the first major American politician to call
explicitly for stringent carbon taxes. His plan to replace the payroll
tax with a levy on fossil fuel might even make political sense.
But
for the moment, it serves as a kind of starter pistol for the
congressional battle. If the Democrats manage to pick up one or both
houses of Congress in November's election,
there will be a real chance to actually pass a law. That's an
opportunity. And that's also an enormous danger, because if we lock
into the wrong plan now, it may be years before we revisit the issue
again. And years are what we don't have.
The temptation will be to simply pass something—most likely some version of the McCain-Lieberman
bill introduced years ago. But that bill was pretty feeble when it
arrived—appreciated, but feeble—and the passage of time has made it
clear that you might just as well pass a law mandating anti-global
warming bumper stickers. Compared with what we've learned in the last
three years about the speed of melting ice caps and glaciers, about the surge in monster storms, about the release of methane
from the permafrost—compared with all that, McCain-Lieberman isn't
even lipstick on a pig. It's like nail polish on Godzilla. Clear nail
polish.
By contrast, the legislation introduced by Henry Waxman in the House and Jim Jeffords in the Senate at
least has targets with the right number of digits. It talks about 80
percent carbon reductions from 1990 levels by 2050, and about 20
percent renewables by 2020. It's not enough to meet the real-world
minimum set out by NASA's Jim Hansen
—that we reverse carbon increases worldwide in a decade—but its numbers
might shock the system enough to give us a fighting chance.
Corporate
interests, of course, will favor something like McCain-Lieberman
(they'll favor something south of it, actually, but bargain in its
direction). The great danger is that the weak members of the
environmental movement will meet them there, ready to declare
bipartisan victory (and a great fundraising opportunity). With Hansen's
challenge ringing in their ears, the great hope is that the leaders of
the big enviro groups— the Green Group—will steel themselves for a real
fight, demanding something like Waxman-Jeffords. Or, as some are
starting to call it, "The Real Climate Act."
They
will waver, imagining that such cuts are politically impossible. But in
fact we don't know—there's never been a real movement about climate
change in this country because there's never been anything to rally
around. When we tested the Waxman-Jeffords bill in
, we assembled the biggest rally against global warming yet in this
country—and convinced even our conservative Republican candidates for
U.S. Senate and House to sign on.
The student climate movement
—representing the people who will get to live on our heated planet for
another six or seven decades—is already pressing the Washington honchos
to find some spine, to make this the defining stand for
environmentalism in our time. It may be politically difficult, but it
won't be as hard as convincing the glaciers not to melt or the sea not
to rise.
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[more]
Earth Headed for Warmest Temps in a Million Years
ABC News
Sept. 25, 2006
In about 45 years, temperatures on Earth will be hotter than at anytime during the past one million years, says the
According to the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the planet is just two degrees shy of an average temperature of 59
degrees Fahrenheit, which is what they believe the temperature was
about a million years ago.
NASA's James Hansen, along with colleagues from the
"Humans are now in control of the Earth's climate, for better or worse," Hansen tells ABC News.
Based
on a "business as usual" scenario in which greenhouse gasses continue
to rise unabated, Hansen says we'll break the million-year-old record
in about 45 years. But he stresses we can't wait that long to cut
greenhouse gas pollution, because of the decades it takes for the
climate system to respond to changes.
"We need to get started now," he says. "We can't wait another decade or two to take this seriously."
Those
2 degrees the scientists are talking about may not sound like much, but
what that change means is that by mid-century, the world will
experience even more record heat waves, wildfires, more intense storms
and flooding.
In
other parts of the world, the increase may worsen drought conditions as
more mountain glaciers and snow packs vanish, no longer sending water
to the valleys below.
And in
a highly unusual move for a scientific paper, the authors devote eight
paragraphs to systematically deconstructing the assertions of a
prominent science fiction novelist. In the non-fiction sections of his
2004 book "State of
Hansen
says Crichton misrepresented his scientific work and, adds the
scientist, has done so in testimony before Congress and in a meeting
with President Bush -- even though he is not a climate expert.
"He is propagating false information to the public," Hansen says.
Crichton, through a publicist, declined ABC News' request for an interview.
