One thought on “In Which I Agree With Jim Hansen”

  1. It’s pathetic how hysterical he gets. He casts this as comparable to the great moral struggles of history.

    “This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.”

    And later he’s ranting about sea levels.

    For all Hansen’s pessimism, he insists there is still hope. “It may be that we have already committed to a future sea level rise of a metre or even more but that doesn’t mean that you give up.

    “Because if you give up you could be talking about tens of metres. So I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it’s too late. In that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet? You want to minimise the damage.”

    This ignores that no one has shown a clear link between human activity and *harm* from global warming such as rising sea levels. Further, we have other great moral issues such as poverty, authoritarianism and other forms of statism, the continuing betterment of the human condition, etc to worry about. Cutting human CO2 emissions doesn’t automatically make those other issues better.

    Elsewhere, I read about his opposition to carbon emission markets so I followed a link in the story to more ignorance. For a good portion of the article on these markets, various people complain about the ineffectiveness of carbon markets.

    Peter Voser, Shell’s chief executive, has called on governments to introduce a carbon tax or a minimum price for CO² because – as he told the Guardian – the ETS was failing to deliver sufficient incentives to kickstart expensive technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

    […]

    The key problem seems to be that ETS carbon prices have remained resolutely low, thwarting low-carbon, high-cost investment. Carbon is currently trading at around $13 a tonne but many believe it needs to be $30, if not $50, to deliver a decisive boost for clean technologies such as wind, solar, CCS and nuclear power.

    Too bad. Why should it trade higher? My view is that the carbon emission markets are working as they were set up to work. The relatively low price simply indicates that it’s not as pressing a matter as first claimed. It’d also help if these markets were sensibly constructed (no fixed cap on the amount of CO2 credits that can be traded).

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