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| James Hansen |
By James Hansen, The New York Times, May 9, 2012
GLOBAL warming
isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a
recent interview with President Obama in Rolling
Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless
of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain
twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire
history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn
our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the
Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50
feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that
the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea
levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become
intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to
extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad
enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the
semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent
drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy
flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest
would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated.
Food prices would rise to unprecedented
levels.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce
emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar
sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in
part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar
sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
The global warming signal is now louder than the
noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal
Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say
with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the
one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events
— they were caused by human-induced climate change.
We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the
atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add
too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high.
This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is
currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would
normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them
higher with fossil fuel emissions.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from
280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands
contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close
cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an
additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels,
instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no
hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as
earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their
control.
We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways
to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected
from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to
all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a
penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic
growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most
Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid
in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the
carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the
proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to
economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil
fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s
governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of
billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract
every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic
fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic
drilling.
President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide
the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak
candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining
that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a
reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American
public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.
The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to
follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals,
environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the
world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and
requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait —
we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming
generations.
James
Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”
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