Climate Change: A hero speaks: James Hansen. Stop Keystone XL and make a carbon agreement with China.

But what's a little disappointing is that we've reached a point where we should really be pounding on the desk of leaders and saying, “Hey, you've got to do something. You have to do something in a hurry or we're going to leave our children and grandchildren a situation that's out of their control. There will be large impacts, which they simply cannot do anything about.” And the basic physics for that is very well understood that the climate system has tremendous inertia, it does not respond quickly as humans or nature applies forces to the system. But now we know those forces, those human made forces — the CO2 amount and how it's changing is known very precisely.

The only way to solve the problem is to put an honest price on the fossil fuels. And it's going to need to be international. So the United States and China are going to have to get together and agree on the fact that they both will need to put a gradually rising price on carbon emissions. And I feel that's a doable thing because China knows that they will suffer from climate change more than most places. They have their 50 million people that are living near sea level. They have tremendous pollution, air and water pollution from fossil fuels. So they have a strong incentive for wanting to deal with this problem.

...we just continue to go after every fossil fuel we can find including those that are very hard to get at, it takes a lot of energy to extract them and they're particularly dirty and cause other environmental problems as well as climate change.

I'm hoping that the Obama administration is beginning to understand this and that they will reject the Keystone Pipeline.


http://www.alternet.org/environment/james-hansen-one-thing-we-should-be-doing-prevent-catastrophic-climate-change?page=0%2C1&akid=10366.294211.GEu7S1&rd=1&src=newsletter830898&t=3