JAMES HANSEN: COPENHAGEN CLIMATE TALKS MUST COLLAPSE
By Shanta Barley
New Scientist
December 3, 2009

Original Link

Outspoken US climate scientist James Hansen has announced that climate talks next week in Copenhagen must collapse if the world is to tackle global warming effectively, reports the UK's Guardian newspaper.

A leading climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen's testimony to US Congress in 1988 played a critical role in raising public awareness of global warming.

Now Hansen's back in the spotlight. He has raised eyebrows by saying that any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen will be counter-productive if it plumps for a "cap and trade" system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track, because it's a disaster track," Hansen told the Guardian's US environment correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg.

"The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means."

Hansen's trademark pessimism comes at a time of hesitant optimism: yesterday India joined the club of major emitters that will offer to cut greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen next week, alongside China, the US and the EU.

So why is the man who has probably done more than any other person on Earth to tackle climate change so keen that Copenhagen goes belly-up? Mainly because he disagrees violently with key governments over how best to control climate change.

Many politicians believe that the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is for governments to set limits on emissions while polluters buy and sell carbon credits -- or "permits to pollute," as Goldenberg calls them -- but Hansen disagrees.

"This is analagous to the indulgences that the Catholic church sold in the Middle Ages. The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity. That is exactly what's happening," he says.

In Hansen's view, the only way to cut emissions is through an ever-increasing tax on carbon emissions. He believes that the "carbon tax" should start at around $1 per gallon of petrol, with revenue returning directly to the public purse, according to the UK's Times Online.

There's no room for compromise, Hansen says.

"This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill. On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

Whether or not Hansen's call for the Copenhagen talks to fail is as effective as environmentalist George Monbiot's recent call for another leading climate change researcher to step down, the timing of his outburst is not inconvenient: his first book, Storms of my Grandchildren, comes out next week.  

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