James Hansen is a world renowned climate scientist. He heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He was one of the first scientists to raise public awareness of climate change when he gave testimony to the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s. Hansen has just written a book “The Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”.
Hansen was on CBC Radio’s The Current yesterday morning, and presented an interesting perspective on the Copenhagen Conference. He said that a deal in Copenhagen would be worse than nothing at all. The Kyoto Accord is an example of this, Hansen says, as CO2 emissions have been increasing since then. Cap and trade is not the answer – Hansen suggests that cap and trade was cooked up by business as a way to make money, not decrease carbon. A better way to go is to put a gradually rising price on CO2 emissions. This gives people and business an incentive to reduce their carbon footprint and is much faster to implement than cap and trade. It also happens to be the route that British Columbia has already taken. It was an interesting and thought-provoking interview. To hear the interview, click here to go the CBC website and go to “Part 1”.
Thanks, I think I’ll go give this a listen. There are serious problems with cap and trade, that is for sure, especially the idea of offsets. However, if we absolutely have to use cap and trade, there are some changes we can make to ensure we’ll at least get some benefit from it.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/12/cap-trade-and-offset.html