Last weekend Iowa native Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute made a homecoming trip to the Hawkeye state to join the March to ReEnergize Iowa and deliver the keynote address at the final rally. See the complete transcript of his speech here and read about the rally in the Des Moines Register.
Dr. Hansen echoed his call for a moratorium on coal and increased youth participation in the preservation of our future. The It’s Getting Hot In Here community generated a list of questions that were delivered to Dr. Hansen and his responses are included below. Please be sure to leave your thoughts and responses in the comments section.
1) In the span of your career, public opinion on global warming has shifted dramatically, have we reached the tipping point necessary to effectively combat it?
That is unclear. Although there has been a recent widespread increase in awareness, it comes at just the same time as an energy crunch due to a booming global economy (especially emergence of China) that is causing a sudden surge of increased coal use. If this is not nipped in the bud, we could lose the ball game.
2) In one of your recent email dispatches, you made a bold statement by calling for a moratorium on coal without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Does the attention and recognition paid to CCS technology divert money and energy from clean energy and efficiency technologies?
It certainly should not. CCS technology is still somewhat of a mirage. As of yet there is no “clean coal” in reality, and commercial availability is probably at least 10 years away with current efforts. If a requirement is placed that coal can only be used if it is truly clean, that will cause a sudden stop in any increased use of coal. Efficiency and renewable energies are likely to be the big winners from such a constraint, at least for a decade and perhaps forever. CCS may be so expensive that it will cause a big change in the attractiveness of coal. Coal is presently very cheap, partly because it is often subsidized and because it almost never has to pay for the environmental damage it does, including mercury pollution of lakes and oceans.
3) What role do you see for youth in bringing forth a moratorium on coal?
The damages of dirty coal will be visited mainly on the youth of today and on the unborn. This is true especially for the climate changes that will be put “into the pipeline” to appear in future decades, but also for effects of water pollution such as brain damage due to mercury in fish, and the mess that is left behind on bull-dozed mountains.
4) What was the major issue on campuses when you were a student? Were you involved?
The Vietnam war. I was a post-doc by the time students really got heated up. They took over buildings on the Columbia University campus. No, I was not involved. It doesn’t fit my personality, I prefer working on science problems. I have had to force myself to get involved in the present case. It seems to me that the most useful thing that I can do is try to contribute to the court cases against inefficient vehicles and coal-fired power plants.
5) If we remove subsidies from carbon-intensive energy sources and manage to put a price on carbon, won’t CCS coal be priced out of the market?
Perhaps, but only if there are alternatives, much of which would probably be energy efficiency. Much more than half of the energy that we use is wasted. So if coal is priced out, that would be great. Imagine the cleaner atmosphere and ocean, and all the good high tech jobs that would be needed to replace that energy source. There are a lot of jobs associated with energy efficiency, as well as renewable energies.
6) Do you think CCS Coal technology will be essential for a low-carbon future for countries like China? Is it problematic, practically, ethically and scientifically, to transfer this technology to China when it is basically untested here?
It will surely be tested here and elsewhere. It can be tested there, as well as here. It is not like this is a dangerous technology that is going to explode and kill people.
7) In light of the fact that the impacts of fossil fuel use extend beyond the greenhouse effect, to what extent should we address the life cycle costs, such as mountain top removal mining and exploitation of impacted communities when confronting global warming?
Absolutely, it is very important to look at the life cycle costs, especially for things such as ethanol. Germany is finding that the huge subsidies they gave coal are now coming back to haunt them. Some villages are sinking a few feet — there are tens of billions of dollars of future costs due to land subsidence. These costs will be born by today’s youth, and the unborn.
Traditional media has failed to reach youth with the message that fighting coal is necessary to preserve our future, what do you think is the role for new media.
Well, one problem is that the media always focuses on today. It shortchanges the young and future generations. I don’t know how to fix that.
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Dr Hansen has stated in papers that since we will predictably burn all the oil and natural gas reserves, burning coal reserves will but us over the edge toward uncontrollable warming. Therefore, his call for a moritorium on new dirty (i.e. non-CCS) coal-fired power plants being built is rational on one level, but also unrealistic.
I am not advocating coal, but it is 1/6th the cost of oil or natural gas to produce energy. Worldwide demand for electricity is expected to double by 2030. Coal is a stable, domestic energy source, especially for developing nations like China and India, whose per capita emissions are far lower than developed nations. China is adding dirty coal-fired plants at the rate of Britain’s entire power grid each year! India will probably follow suit soon. The US generates half of it’s electricity from coal. Are you beginning to see how improbable a moritorium on new dirty coal-fired plants is (and a rapid phase out of existing ones)?
As Dr Hansen says, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology is decades away, the cost to build and operate will be prohibitive, and it is doubtful wheither old dirty coal-fired plants can be retrofitted for CCS.
By the way, one factor that hardly ever is considered is global dimming-it take about 20 years for a new coal-fired plant to cause global warming, because the pollution the coal plant puts into the air also dims the sun, counteracting the effect of the CO2 it also pollutes. Whereas the CO2 stays in the air hundreds of years, the global dimming pollution falls out of the sky within a couple of months. If you stop that coal pollution, we could see a dramatic jump in temperatures immediately, some say as high as 2C!
Instead, I suggest removing the CO2 from the air using the low cost, highly scalable, and technically feasible method called “biosequestration.” I suggest improving nature’s ability to remove the CO2 using genetic engineering-perhaps seeding a GMO into the ocean.
The high cost of completely rebuilding our energy infrastructure is causing politically grid-lock. It is unreasonable to expect mankind to so drastically cut their emissions so fast as to avoid either abrupt climate change or runaway global warming. A moritorium on dirty coal-fired plants is a great example of the difficulty. Besides, in a warming world, natural emissions are expected to increase, while nature’s ability to remove the CO2 from the air is expected to decrease, plus developing nations are expected to continue increasing their emissions-any feasible cuts we make will be overwhelmed.
Biosequestration could save billions of lives and trillions of dollars, whereas the mitigation stategy of cutting emissions will very likely be too little, too late. Dr Hansen is correct when he states that any feasible startegy to rescue the planet must include a method of removing the excess CO2 from the air. I hope we don’t put that carbon from vast coal reserves into the air, but I wouldn’t want to bet the planet on it.
Brad,
If our mitigation is too little, too late it is partly because of people who misunderstand the economics and role of coal power. Coal power is neither 1/6th the cost of Oil and gas to produce electricity nor as cheap as it is made out to be. Coal is cheap because the companies that burn it don’t pay the costs of the environmental, social, or health costs of the fuel. Worldwide electricity demand growth figures for decades have been over-inflated and assume business-as-usual with no accounting for efficiency or a worldwide response to global warming.
Also the idea of India following China in producing similar numbers of coal plants is just silly. Circumstances are very different between the two countries.
Your basic assumption is not that renewable energy, efficiency, design, and economic change cannot mitigate emissions, just that it is politically unfeasible.
How is tinkering with the oceans, Earth’s Life Support system, with the injection of a massively invasive GMO organism (that we don’t even have) that would probably destroy most of the life in the oceans, be more politically feasible than a plan that would save consumers money, produce enormous quantities of domestic employment, improve public health, and reduce our consumption of foreign oil from unstable and hostile regimes?
Everything I have read indicates that India’s electric demand will increase. The question is how much, how soon. Much of the developing world needs a lot of electricity just for water treatment, hospitals, and other public health needs. If energy storage can be made inexpensive, then there are many options for the global demand growth.
Perhaps political feasibility for dealing with climate change will increase once the public accepts the science. It sounds like folks agree carbon is causing warming, but they are reluctant to accept the scientific consensus on the scale of the effects.
I would be sorry to give my children a world where even though we have stopped climate change, the oceans are fouled with GMO organisms that have proliferated and destroyed all life, coal and other fossil fuels have destroyed countless communities and ecosystems, and mercury and acid rain have pervaded our biosphere to an even greater extent.
Arrogance in the power of man is greatly responsible for this current crisis, and as such I am skeptical of any attempts to “improve” nature through projects that are carried out without full thought of the infinite complexity of ecosystems.
We need to create a new economics that integrates the costs of “externalities” such as massive destruction of ecosystems and huge costs to human health. To me it seems that accepting that India and China will follow the development path of the West is accepting that there is no possibility for real, systemic change.
We have the technology to halt climate change. What we truly need it a new thought paradigm, that allows us to live in harmony with nature, and move away from the concept of domination that has driven Western thought for so long, and work for a just, sane and sustainable society
Maybe I did not say it clearly: To purify water, refrigerate food, and illuminate a living space requires energy. Yes you can have higher efficiency devices that use less than are used now, but still energy must be used. China, India, and many other developing nations have basic energy needs that, even with high efficiency devices, will entail large energy demand growth. Even if these countries use 25% of the per capita energy of the US (which is about half of the per capita of countries such as Switzerland or Japan), an additional 2 – 3 TW will be needed.
With cheaper energy storage you might be able to do it with renewables, but there had better be a backup plan (fusion? thorium?) if the technology does not pan out in time.
I agree with Amy and Richard that a GMO in the ocean does not sound any more technically practical or politically feasible than the options available now.
Amy wrote, “Arrogance in the power of man is greatly responsible for this current crisis, and as such I am skeptical of any attempts to “improve” nature through projects that are carried out without full thought of the infinite complexity of ecosystems.”
Agreed! When are we going to learn that natural systems are far more complex than we think?! Plans to tinker with these systems as if they were some great clockwork machine should have died out with the ‘modern’ enlightenment movement that invented this thinking. Let’s focus on returning carbon emissions to levels within the capacity of the natural carbon cycle to absorb and sequester. If we blow those efforts, maybe we can consider a more drastic solution, but at that point, I’d be even more concerned we’d just be trading one massive problem for another.
I also like Hansen’s approach to coal with CCS. As I’ve said before here and in other venues, I don’t think we should be coming out strongly against ‘clean’ coal (coal+CCS). Rather, we should focus our attention on gaining a moratorium on coal plants that do not sequester their emissions and remain ambivalent about coal+CCS. Leave it as an option on the table, invest some money in demonstrating whether or not it is feasible and safe (i.e. will the carbon stay down, and in what kinds of geologic formations) and work on ensuring we close the externalities that make coal look cheaper than it truly is. Then, if coal+CCS is still a viable option and the private sector wants to finance and build it, let them go for it. I agree with Hansen that it’s likely that renewable energy and particularly increased energy efficiency will seem like far more attractive options, at least over the next several decades, so I don’t think we should waste much energy or political capital fighting coal+CCS.
Also, given the scale of the problem (which Brad and R Margolis both point out), I’m reluctant to take any low-carbon tools off the table. We may just need to get a little bit dirty to solve the climate crisis…
HTML version of the Transcript (PDF) of Hansen’s Aug 5 ‘Declaration of Stewardship for the Earth and all Creation’ speech