NY Times, Observer, Guardian: Jim Hansen steps up attack on cap-and-trade, hopes Copenhagen collapses (sort of)
The scientist best known in the world for openly worrying and haranguing about climate change got himself plenty of ink in the last week or two. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, has done so while keeping his private citizen hat firmly on his brow. One of his aims is to derail anything short of a stiff tax, or fee, on carbon emissions as near to useless as a way to discourage greenhouse gas buildup.
He’s been doing this for awhile. And with the Copenhagen meetings opening today, he has in the past week or so has landed two big spots for his op-ed byline plus a bare-knuckle interview in consequential international news outlets.
Most prominent here in America is his commentary that the New York Times ran this morning. He calls cap-and-trade an opportunity for big business and Wall Street traders to fleece the public while doing little to curb carbon. It also summarizes his increasingly loud argument that collecting fees (as he calls them, but everybody else would call them taxes) on carbon, and redistributing essentially all the money to the citizenry. The idea is that those with little carbon footprints make money while those with big ones have a powerful incentive to get green as fast as they can all without the incredible paper and regulatory work needed to assure honesty of cap-and-trade contracts.
A similar piece of his ran a week ago Sunday in the UK’s Observer newspaper, where he called the Copenhagen plank for cap-and-trade a fraud that must be exposed.
Plus, at the Observer’s partner newspaper The Guardian, reporter Suzanne Goldenberg last week interviewed Hansen and got him declaring flatly that if climate change is to be confronted, the Copenhagen talks must collapse into inaction.
Hansen does raise good points, and is getting them into circulation. Few reporters seem however to be looking deeply into his arguments. For one, even if cap-and-trade is too friendly to corruption to ever work, would failure at Copenhagen accelerate the world toward an economically simpler system of carbon taxes – or send it in exactly the opposite direction? The answer is probably “maybe” but one hopes more reporters take it on.
One must note that Hansen’s missive today is practically twinned with a column by Nobel prize winning economist and Times staffer Paul Krugman – in which the latter accepts cap-and-trade as a reasonable (and politically digestible) step toward a solution. Maybe the paper will run Krugman’s response soon. For now, he already has a blog post out: Unhelpful Hansen. In it, he even draws a picture.
Maybe the Science Writers in New York, or the Poynter Institute or the Pew Center or somebody, should book Hansen and Krugman for a debate (maybe they have and I missed it?) That’d be a show. The skeptics would love to see the global warming worriers flailing away at one another. I’d still like to see it.
- Charlie Petit
