On the first day of a planned two-week sit in at the White House organized by TarSandsAction over 70 people were arrested including one of the lead organizers organizer Bill McKibben. In an attempt to intimidate concerned citizens and policy makers from continuing the sit-in, the National Park Service did not honor its previous agreement with McKibben and others to "catch and release" participants but is holding them in jail over the weekend. Numerous environmental organizations and leading climate scientists have condemned the Keystone XL Pipeline project which would bring 900,000 barrels of dirty oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to Texas refineries. Preeminent climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute James Hansen has described the Alberta Tar Sands oil extraction development as a game-over proposition for climate change. Sunday afternoon, he addressed the continuing struggle to address the ever increasing threat of anthropogenic climate change. Dr. Hansen will be participating in the protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in Washington, DC on August 29th with religious leaders.
JC: President Obama had lofty promises regarding climate change and the environment during his campaign. To date, his administration has failed to deliver and is now positioned to approve the Tar Sands Pipeline, the worst idea in many years in terms of its impact on climate. Do you see any signs that the Obama administration is moving to seriously address climate change? Do you feel they administration deserves a second chance?
JH: Are they serious? The tar sands pipeline approval or disapproval will provide the sign of whether the Obama administration is serious about climate change and protecting the future of young people.Do they deserve a second chance? Yes, everybody deserves a second chance.
Obama's first chance was when he was elected -- he could have made energy independence and climate a top priority. Talking nice about sun and wind and green jobs is just greenwash. The only effective policy would be a rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies with 100 percent of the funds distributed to the public -- stimulating the economy and moving us rapidly toward a clean energy future. Anything less is just blather.
JC: CO2 levels have now exceeded 391 ppm, and US emissions are growing again at a record rate, over 4% this year so far. This in spite of an ever increasing body of scientific evidence that unequivocally demonstrates anthropogenic climate change to be seriously affecting global climate life support systems. It would seem that policy makers and business leaders the world over are incapable of altering the dead-on course to climate collapse. What can be done?
JH: The problem is that the policy makers the world over are paying more attention to the fossil fuel lobbyists than they are to the well being of young people and nature, as my colleagues and I have described in the paper "The Case for Young People and Nature".
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.That's the point of the present action -- to draw attention to the inter-generational injustice of current policies -- our children and grandchildren are getting shafted by our well-oiled coal-fired politicians who do not look beyond their next election.
The tar sands verdict will show whether he really intends to move us to clean energy or whether he will instead support going after dirtier and dirtier fuels (tar sands, oil shale, mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, deep ocean and Arctic exploration, etc.).
JC: As you know over 70 people including our friends Bill McKibben and Gus Speth were arrested yesterday in front of the White House. As always, Bill and the group had repeated discussions with the authorities prior to the action and were assured that this would be "catch and release". As it turns out the National Park Service changed the terms of engagement and are holding everyone (except DC residents) over the weekend to discourage others from participating in the two weeks of protest. Do you think this change of tactic by the National Park Service will be effective in dissuading others from attending?
JH: No. What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue. As Albert Einstein said, "thought without action is a crime." Choosing silence and safety is not an option.Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King -- and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.
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As for the Tar Sands we can lay this one right at the feet of the idiots in the environmental lobby. They have been proud that they stopped nice clean oil drilling offshore and in Alaska – now we have the dirty tar sands solution and they own it.
And FYI Hanson just blasted the fairy tales from the alternatives crowd.
(1) Hansen’s comparison of belief in renewables to belief in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy and his comparison of such policies to forcing his grandchildren to drink kool-aid. Hansen placed part of the “intellectual” blame for widespread belief in such policies on Amory Lovins, a prominent American environmentalist who was the first proponent of soft renewables as a large footprint energy solution. It appears to me that there appears to be a direct lineage from Lovins’ fantasies criticized by Hansen to the IPCC Greenpeace scenario in the recent WG3 report on renewables.
http://climateaudit.org/
Everybody is in such a hurry to see results these days.
You have to give the ocean a little time to heat up.
Missing Heat - NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
Ocean Heat Content Adjustments: Follow-up and More Missing Heat
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/20/ocean-heat-content-adjustments-follow-up-and-more-missing-heat/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/03/global-sst-update-through-mid-march-2011/
In the released CRU emails NCAR climate scientist Kevin Trenberth says:
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Last week Science magazine gave Trenberth a chance to explain what he meant by this comment, which has been much discussed in the aftermath of the released emails (the image above is from that article). In that article, Trenberth, and Kevin Fasullo, write:
Over the past 50 years, the oceans have absorbed ~90% of the energy added to the climate system; the rest has gone into melting sea and land ice and heating the land surface and atmosphere ( 4). CO2 concentrations have further increased since 2003, and even more heat should have accumulated at a faster rate since then. Where has this energy gone (see the figure)?
The rest of your post is as truthful as your statements about offshore drilling. Don't have any kids, do you?
And yes i have 3 kids and we stay far away from coal plants.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Since when did we give up our right to peaceably assemble or to petition the Government for a redress of grievances?
We have a climate that has crossed the line already- with early tipping points with more extremes and instability that causes many of us now to live in a state of "Am I next" to be hit with some kind of weird, extreme or potentially violent event. The arctic this year is melting at a rate that could come close to the 2007 event in late summer, of seeing a huge drop off in extent and volume.
As Dr. Hansen says- the public will not demand change until we begin to see a further breakdown in the climate. That is happening now- but in 5-10 years it will become worse. If we wait till after 2020 to begin a program to make reductions in C02- the costs for the economy grow exponentially. The ruin of the climate by then may have reached anyway- it paints an exceedingly bleak and chaotic future for all.
the only holes are in right now the rapidly melting arctic sea ice
do some research check out the Arctic Sea Ice Blog
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/
then look at yourself in the mirror- and ask yourself if you have any ethics?
the holes you will find in the arctic sea ice- right now which is melting very rapidly
just as Dr Hansen predicted- when C02 levels reach this level.
Then go to the mirror- and ask yourself this; Do I have any moral conscious? Have fun.
Its melting! at an historical amount----
Hansen was right- you? the moderators here would not allow me to say what you are.
Once you get these gigantic "social programs" out of the way, you might be able to focus on the real problem, which is that it's quite impossible for a country to remain solvent when a prior President was stupid enough to run two wars on a VISA and generate such significant tax breaks for the rich that the United States is now about the 64TH COUNTRY IN THE WORLD down in the gap between rich and poor. There are third-world countries with better stats than us, and that, not by coincidence, is exactly where we're headed.
By the way, comparing a concern about the environment with debt was not logical on its face from the get-go anyway. Logic 101 is probably even offered in junior colleges.
Consider the situation of a future generation, say in 50 years. What fraction of the GDP will be needed to support the health care and the SS payments for retirees? This is not a new topic. I expect they will be more concerned about the debt than about the temperature and sea level.
He's already the most accomplished clean energy President in American history by leaps and bounds. It's simply misleading to dismiss that with blanket statements like claiming that "his administration has failed to deliver." He has made significant accomplishments given the fossil fuel majority in Congress. Why let Congress off the hook by failing to mention their role in blocking more progress?
When Henry Ford told a New York Times reporter that ethyl alcohol was "the fuel of the future" in 1925, he was expressing an opinion that was widely shared in the automotive industry. "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust -- almost anything," he said. "There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."
Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.
Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp; he actually ran the thing on peanut oil for the 1900 World's Fair.
As for an alternative to petroleum...
Hemp grows like mad from border to border in America; so shortages are unlikely.
Hemp fuel is biodegradable; so oil spills become fertilizer not eco-catastrophes.
Growing hemp for fuel would be a tremendous boon for American farmers and the agricultural industry.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=872
melting as Hansen predicted as C02 reaches this level and global temperatures are now at the warmest part of the Holocene.
Oil plays a dominant role in meeting the world’s energy needs, and this situation is expected to continue for decades. Even with the investments that world governments, including Canada, are making in renewable energy, in efficiency and in other measures to support a low-carbon energy future, the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook for 2009 still expects world oil demand to grow by 1 percent per year to 2030.
As the more easily accessible and lighter crude oils are depleted around the world, countries are turning increasingly to heavier and less accessible oil resources, which are more energy intensive to extract and process. Through strict regulatory regimes and new technological developments, Canada is committed to developing our heavy oil resources, including the oil sands, in a sustainable and responsible way.
More progressive information:
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/pdf/os-sb-eng.pdf
The oil sands pipeline projects are a peaceful way of ending "famine, war, relocation, and other turmoil". There is nothing wrong with profits as long as the rewards and risks are shared equally between capital, and labor.
In the spring of 1968 Robert Kennedy said: "Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things…. Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
After 5,000 years of humankind developing petroleum natural resources such as bitumen there is close to 6,000 different peaceful products that "makes life worthwhile" being used by billions of people everyday.
If the protesters really want to make a positive change for the betterment of our species they should be protesting in front of their local burger joints. Over one billion tons of cattle fecal, and urine wastes along with tens of millions of pounds of cattle antibiotics, and hormones, wash through the ground into American drinking water every year. 12,000 gallons of freshwater is used to produce every pound of beef the protesters eat. Cattle accounts for 28% of U.S. methane emissions from human related activities.
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2011/tippingpoint/
http://www.fftimes.com/node/236266
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/08/30/oil-sands-athabasca-river.html
http://solveclimatenews.com/news/20110516/Athabasca-River-Alberta-oil-sands-toxins-cancer
Those tar sands look like acres of cancer cells.
(1) Hansen’s comparison of belief in renewables to belief in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy and his comparison of such policies to forcing his grandchildren to drink kool-aid. Hansen placed part of the “intellectual” blame for widespread belief in such policies on Amory Lovins, a prominent American environmentalist who was the first proponent of soft renewables as a large footprint energy solution. It appears to me that there appears to be a direct lineage from Lovins’ fantasies criticized by Hansen to the IPCC Greenpeace scenario in the recent WG3 report on renewables.
http://climateaudit.org/