Students take a stand on Boston Common.Ian MacLellanIt seemed like I had just fallen asleep in my bivvy on the hard soil of the Boston Common on Sunday night, when I was rudely awakened around 1:00 a.m. by the voice of Craig Altemose, founder and driving force behind the Massachusetts Leadership Campaign, crackling through a bullhorn: "Wake up everybody. The police are here and they have given us a two-minute warning. If you do not want to be cited for trespassing, you need to move immediately off the Common."

One hundred and fifty students and community supporters gathered for the third time to sleep out the Common, a weekly focal point for dozens of on-campus sleep-outs that began the day after 350.org's Oct. 24 Day of Climate Action. This Sunday we were joined by Dr. James Hansen, whose crumpled porkpie hat I picked out of the crowd as students and community supporters stumbled out, bleary-eyed, of the 44 tents pitched directly across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House.

The Boston Police were very relaxed as they collected identification, and not everyone followed the advice of our National Lawyer's Guild attorneys to offer nothing beyond the most basic information. I found myself standing behind Hansen, who did follow instructions, but not for lack of trying by the officer questioning him, who seemed genuinely befuddled by the presence of this grandfatherly physicist from Pennsylvania. "Do you have kids here?" he asked Jim, "Aren't there enough causes in Pennsylvania that you have to come all the way to Boston to collect a summons?"

Hansen, of course, has no shortage of climate action opportunities and it's a measure of the intelligent strategy crafted by Students for a Just and Stable Future (formerly Massachusetts Power Shift), that the NASA scientist would choose to come to Boston. Like the Climate Ground Zero direct actions at Coal River Mountain, which Hansen has also personally joined, the Massachusetts student campaign is important for several reasons.

The campaign aims to put Massachusetts on record endorsing Hansen's call for 350 ppm and pass legislation requiring 100 percent clean electricity in the Commonwealth by 2020. These are common sense, measured objectives, which appear startlingly bold only against a backdrop of dinky measures advanced by major environmental organizations willing to compromise before conflict is even joined, as repeatedly demonstrated in the handling of Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry.

"Wake Up - Sleep Out!" is also a brilliant tactic, with great promise to spread to campuses throughout the U.S. In what has become a nightly ritual at every sleep-out, participants gather to sit in a tight circle, each standing in turn to introduce themselves, state which college they attend, give the date on which they "woke up," how many nights each has spent out of doors, and when they plan to sleep-out next. On Sunday, there were students from Bunker Hill Community College and Amherst, Westfield State and Hampshire College (my alma mater), UMass and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Mount Holyoke and Smith College, among others. Significantly, regarding the prospect for spreading the campaign outside Massachusetts, there were also students from Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut.

Marla Marcum, chair of the Climate Change Task Force of the United Methodist Church in New England, and a key campaign leader, compared the student action with the biblical story of Esther, bride to a Persian king who overstepped protocol, knowing the penalty was death, in order to save her people from annihilation. "When Esther hesitated to take a personal risk in order to safeguard the future of her people," said Marla, "her uncle encouraged her, saying, 'Perhaps you have come for a time such as this.' Today we are in a position to call on our leaders to safeguard the future of all people.  Like Esther, we must choose between doing the usual thing, the safe thing, the comfortable thing and doing what is right and necessary, even at some cost.” The Mass Leadership students are doing the right thing – calling upon Governor Deval Patrick to introduce 100 percent renewables legislation and refusing to sleep in dorms powered by dirty coal, in order to make there plea emphatic.

Ken Ward (left) and James Hansen (center) identify themselves to Boston police.Ian MacLellanOne cannot spend a night on the Common and come away with any thought that the sleep outs are a gimmick. These smart, earnest students -- who head to their tents between 6-8 each night, pull out laptops and study – are making a profound statement about how dire the climate climate crisis is, how we are all intimately, individually and institutionally culpable, and how change, if it is to come in time, demands action outside the confines of what might be called "personal life-as-usual."

If there is a single failure that stands above the swirl of missteps, cognitive dissonance and blind obedience to organizational imperatives that has fatally undermined the U.S. environmentalist climate agenda, it is our seeming incapacity to act as if we believe what we are saying. We are so close to the tough, daily, grinding business of trying to push immense political stones up hill, that there is little opportunity to step back and contemplate what it is we communicate by the sum total -- the gestalt -- of our efforts.

Imagine a make believe land, similar to our own, but in which Dr. James Hansen was delayed by a couple decades in putting his finger on the problem. In this land, climate change would not  leak by drips and drabs into the national conscience. The crisis would appear full blown, our attention to it riveted, perhaps, by the sudden disappearance of the Arctic ice cap.

In such straits, what might environmentalists do? I expect leaders in this make believe land, shocked by the terrible threat of planetary decimation and stunned by the scale of change and minuscule timeframe within which a functional, global solution must be achieved, would intuitively rush to take actions which we in the real world, faced with what Bill McKibben calls a “slow moving” crisis, have not envisioned. The couple hundred individuals who control institutional environmentalism in the make believe world, as they do here, would convene and form a joint campaign, coalition or conference, determine that all secondary programs should be dropped and all extent reserves invested in a single, last minute effort.

Having quickly, brutally and dramatically reconfigured their institution, environmentalists in make believe land -- without yet having determined what to demand or how to go about winning -- would have acquired more power and singleminded purpose than U.S. environmentalists, with two decades to prepare, have yet mustered. Our mirror environmentalists would be acting appropriately in the circumstances, underlining their statements of dire risk through serious and appropriate action.

The Massachusetts Leadership Campaign is nearly unique, here in the real world, because its student leaders have taken steps -- moderate, to be sure, but firmly and emphatically outside ordinary life, where looming climate cataclysm is fended off or downplayed.

Climate cataclysm cannot be averted by half measures plumped by half hearted spokespersons employed by organizations conducting business as usual. Sleeping out on campus, in the community and on the Boston Common may seem small potatoes compared to the well oiled ACES juggernaut, but it would be a mistake to think so. At its core, the Mass Leadership Campaign presents a profound moral challenge to denial, which is far more dangerous to the status quo than anything else we are doing.

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Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are EPA attorneys who have taken up advocating against cap-and-trade on behalf of rebated carbon taxes, most recently in a Washington Post op-ed. They also posted a video to YouTube making many of the same arguments at somewhat greater length. Now the EPA has instructed them to take the video down by the close of business today, at pain of disciplinary action from EPA ethics officials, and to submit any future drafts to EPA officials before posting. Here it is (likely gone soon):

The issue is in how Williams & Zabel identify themselves. In the WaPo op-ed they are identified merely as "EPA attorneys." In the video they say the following:

Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the US EPA in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.

Later, Zabel says:

In my work at EPA I have been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years. My unique and extensive experience has convinced me that carbon offsets won't work.

EPA officials have informed Williams & Zabel that they may not reveal that they've worked at EPA for 20 years, or that Zabel has direct experience with offsets. They may only mention, once, that they are "EPA attorneys."

Williams & Zabel are consulting with EPA ethics officials and seeking legal counsel. EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy said on Friday evening that she was gathering information on the issue before commenting.

When Bush administration NASA officials attempted to monitor and control what scientist James Hansen said to the press, they were rightly criticized. By the same token, even though I think many of Williams & Zabel's policy arguments are deeply flawed, I can't see any justification for refusing them the right to communicate honestly about their backgrounds to the public. EPA should back off.

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Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Courtesy 350reasons.org350.org is taking a big-tent approach to activism on its International Day of Climate Action this Saturday, inviting anyone who wants to help to join a climate-change demonstration, or create one of their own.

That open invitation means not everyone will be pushing the same message. In fact, a trio of groups will use the day, and the number 350, to highlight their opposition to market-based approaches to capping global warming emissions. In other words, to oppose cap-and-trade, the mechanism integral to the clean energy bill in Congress and to the United Nations approach.

Those groups—Rising Tide North America, Carbon Trade Watch, and the Camp for Climate Action—recently launched 350reasons.org, a collection of reasons why they oppose emissions trading. At climate-day events on Saturday they'll be handing out pamphlets (sorry, "zines"), detailing some of those reasons. They’ve also promised a “video report,” to be released soon. They've essentially taken a no-compromise approach to climate action, preferring to defeat a flawed plan rather than see it succeed and hope it can be fixed later on.

“We’re trying to say there’s no way to reach 350 parts per million through carbon trading,” said Rising Tide’s Brihannala Morgan, a U.C. Berkeley graduate student. “It’s a false solution.”

Among the 350 reasons:

Actually, the group has 450 reasons at the moment, Morgan said; it’s working to edit them down.

350.org founder Bill McKibben says the point of Saturday's events was never to choose specific policies, but to build a broad movement demanding that leaders reverse the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. For too long, he said, the climate problem has been a debate between experts—scientists, economists, and policy wonks.

“There’s been no movement to back them up, no counter-pressure big enough to stand up to the unrelenting pressure from vested interest,” he said last week. “We’re helping provide the popular part of that movement.”

While 350.org doesn’t take positions on specific policy strategies such as cap-and-trade, it shares the sense of urgency of the no-cap-and-trade groups. For that matter, most people working to push a climate bill through Congress share the same sense of urgency. Most readily admit that any bill that can pass through Congress will be too weak to stop climate change. But they would prefer to get started rather than to insist on a perfect bill.

“We have to start some place and we have to start now,” Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, said in response to a Rising Tide campaign last month.

350.org organizers say they’re OK with off-message groups joining Saturday’s events.

“We encouraged lots of different groups to join,” said May Boeve, a 350.org partnerships director. “We’ve cast a very large net.”

Those groups will include churches, performance artists, and extreme athletes. They will include Chinese businessmen holding a black-tie gala in Shanghai, an odd partner for the 350reasons.org groups critical of corporate influence.

When I asked McKibben about how to engage the ‘no-compromise’ types last week, he said it was too soon to fight over plans. No legislation would be sufficient until the public was making more noise on the climate emergency.

“It’s too early to make calls on what happens with the legislation, because we haven’t built a movement to push that process as hard as it needs to be pushed,” he said. “Politicians aren’t feeling pressure either in Washington or in Copenhagen to do more than the minimum. We need to provide that pressure.

“Another way to say that is, we need to give people who want to do the right thing some room to do it. Barack Obama has not laid his cards on the table yet. We need to give him some maneuvering room, to show him that people have his back, not just here but all over the world.”

The question, then, seems to be whether 350reasons.org and the like will amplify the pressure on political leaders, or fracture it.

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On a recent work day at the JP Green House, volunteers came out of the woodwork.Leise JonesOne of the early effects of climate change was the demise of my marriage. I was living a comfortable, middle-class life that was all wrong for my politics, and my essential devotion to simplicity. At some point in my mid-twenties I had gotten nervous, and opted for the safety of a life much like my parents'. It worked until I encountered the work of James Hansen and Bill McKibben in the late 1990s, and the part of me that longed to live and work for the truth rose up.

Most people thought it was a mid-life crisis when I left my marriage, determined to devote myself to full-time work on climate change. I'm sure it was, but I clung to the Jungian notion that our shadow rises in midlife and forces us to confront our unlived lives. Within three years I was divorced, working full-time as a community organizer, and building the JP Green House with Ken Ward, another casualty of truth and principles.

I had meanwhile been through that tangle of denial/despair/rage and bargaining that seems to afflict those newly acquainted with the realities we face. Like a person faced with terminal illness, there is no easy path through, and there is no reasonable order or timeframe to these feelings. I have spent several months in a robotic depressed state, struggling to remain functional for my kids. There are times when I still "bargain": I read about some new techno-fix to cool the planet and I think, "Thank God, maybe this will save us!" And denial is just a necessity in everyday life: None of us can really hold the sense that our children's lives may be hell on earth in our minds while we do the grocery shopping and run the carpool. All this was, and is, going on while I was falling in love, raising children, making a living, and building a house.

Ladder-day saints.Leise JonesI proposed to write about the best part about climate change here, ironic as it may seem, so here it is: courage. All over the world, and throughout history, people have faced down dictators, protested war and conquest, put their lives at risk defending their principles.  Remember the Abolitionists who sheltered slaves, the Europeans who hid and protected Jews during World War II, ordinary Tibetans. American life, at first glance, seems to offer little opportunity for real courage, for sacrifice of comfort in order to live in truth. Climate change, the company of activists, has offered me that, and I think it offers us all this opportunity. In order to turn our world around, save ourselves, we have to fight complacency, denial, political expediency, and our own love of excess.

When you are in the right place, you meet the right people.  The photographs you see here are of one of our recent "Work Days" at the JP Green House. With minimal publicity, we turned out 40 people who did not know us, to spend a day doing hard labor on a house that will demonstrate the best-case scenario of our future. We are the fearful, the despairing, the worried, and we are doing the only thing we can -- planting ourselves in a place of truth and getting to work.

Vaclav Havel, dissident and then president of Czechoslovakia, was the hero of my twenties, which I spent living in the Czech Republic. Havel's message was that we all "live in truth," to above all not accept the totalitarian conquest of our souls. His conclusion is where you land after the climate crisis hits you personally.

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Courtesy Climate SOSGlobal warming activists endorsed by the preeminent climatologist James Hansen are working to defeat the climate and energy bill in Congress, and they’re using some provocative stunts to spread their message.

Briefly:

At least three groups worked together on last week’s events—Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, and “Greenwash Guerrillas,” which pied Thomas Friedman last year. They all hold a “no compromise” philosophy on climate-change action, opposing carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell pollution credits and arguing that larger environmental groups such as NRDC have compromised too much in working with businesses and Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s an awkward position to be environmentalists working on climate change but opposing a climate bill,” said Climate SOS organizer Rachel Smolker, a Vermont ecologist and author. “Especially with a new administration that we want to support. But we felt we need to take a really strong position because this [bill] is so inadequate.”

The campaign is awkward for “establishment” green groups too. They’ve been preparing to battle fossil-fuel interests over the energy bill introduced in the Senate this week. Now they must figure out if and how to respond to this attack from the far left.

“It’s troubling,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “No one believes that the clean energy bill that will come out of Congress will address the threat of global warming in a single step. But we have to start.”

“The real enemies are Big Oil and Big Coal and the right wing attack machine,” he said. “For them to mock [Gore] in the way they did shows that they don’t understand you need to attack your enemies and not your allies.”

Hansen’s involvement is especially troublesome. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wasn’t involved in the New York stunts, but he endorsed Climate SOS’s recent tour against a climate bill. The $2 trillion bill includes his statement that a cap-and-trade program “would be worse for the environment than doing nothing.”

The opposition by Hansen and Climate SOS is unlikely to influence Washington policymakers, in Weiss’s opinion, but it’s got the potential to make everyday Americans think the situation is hopeless.

“If they hear from such a respected scientist as James Hansen that what Congress is doing won’t matter, then why would they bother to call their senators to say ‘Act on this’?” he said.

Climate SOS activists at NRDC's headquartersCourtesy tanukiAside from the stunts last week, other moves by the “no-compromise” camp are downright perplexing. Last week Greenwash Guerrillas launched a website in response to Cleanenergyworks.us, a three-month-old diverse coalition supporting a comprehensive energy bill. The similar-sounding Cleanenergyworks.biz was a replica of the real Clean Energy Works site, with two notable changes: The phone number and email address for spokesperson Josh Dorner had been changed. His name was left the same. The site changed to a more innocuous version over the weekend and is currently down. (Have a screen grab? Send it in and we’ll post.)

Dorner had no interest in speaking about the site that took his name. “I don’t send too much of my day worrying about a website,” he said Thursday. “There are considerably more important tasks before us to get this bill across the Senate floor.”

NRDC spokesperson Michael Oko shared Dorner’s reluctance to give attention to the stunts. “There are a lot of different groups out there,” he said in regard to the banner hung at NRDC’s office. “Everybody has the right to express themselves.”

About the replica website Oko said, “Frankly, I was a little confused about what their intention was.”

Smolker of Climate SOS said the idea was “to provide a spoof, to reveal the emptiness of the claims Clean Energy Works provides. For them, it’s green jobs and clean energy and everything’s a smiley-face, you know? Our goal is to tell people to look deeper and take the smiley faces off.”

At Environmental Defense Fund.Courtesy tanukiShe said she contributed ideas for the mock site, but individuals from Greenwash Guerrillas, who did not want to be identified, created the idea.

The 51-year-old Smolker has seen firsthand how environmental groups can evolve, professionalize, and grow in wealth and influence. Her father was one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another group targeted by Climate SOS last week. EDF met in her childhood home when it was still a “ragtag group,” as Climate SOS is now, she said. (Smolker, who works for Biofuel Watch, declined to give funding information for Climate SOS but said all members were volunteers.)

“We’ve played that compromise game for a long time,” she said. “There’s too much at stake right now.”

The compromise question—whether to sacrifice what is ecologically necessary for what seems politically possible--has been around as long as the green movement itself. The naturalist-and-mystic John Muir and the politician-and-forester Gifford Pinchot clashed over the same tensions in the early 20th century.

As for Hansen’s “worse than nothing” remark, there has been plenty written about the failings of the House climate and energy bill—it gives away too much to dirty-energy backers, it even protects coal-plant pollution from further regulation. But there is historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala notes.

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist,” writes Begala. “Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start.”

Most progressives, including many major green groups, would gladly embrace an imperfect climate bill as a start.

“Those who see the House clean energy bill as somehow tainted by deals, and therefore want a carbon tax, have to understand that no tax proposal would ever emerge from Congress as we know it without similar or worse deals being made,” said Weiss. “Unfortunately the moral high ground of ‘we must act for our children’ is necessary but not sufficient for our political process.”

Smolker said Climate SOS would continue on a different tack, insisting on an acceptable bill from the get-go. She expected the group would pause to take stock of the bill released in the Senate this week, then regroup.

Here's Cap'n Trade delivering his message to Danish climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard:

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Cross-posted from Earth Island Institute.

A recent article in the New York Times pointedly asked whether NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen still matters. The subtext to the story was, has Hansen been too vocal and too unconventional in his criticism of Washington’s response to climate change to be taken seriously?

Hansen, dubbed by some as the “father of global warming,” has been connecting the dots between science and politics since his groundbreaking 1988 testimony to Congress about the greenhouse effect. In the last year, however, Hansen has gone far beyond talking about climate change. He’s now taking direct action to stop it.

I began talking with Dr. Hansen when he took part in the Capitol Climate Action, a protest by more than 2,500 people last March at the coal plant that provides heating and cooling for congressional buildings. What struck me most about Hansen was that after more than 30 years of working within “the system” to solve the climate crisis, he felt driven to protest. When a man who knows more about the science of global warming than almost anyone risks arrest to get attention for the issue, perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to take heed.

Young people certainly are. Hansen’s relevance may be in question among some reporters, but to the youth who are spearheading the climate movement, he is a heroic force. When Hansen announced that he would attend the Capitol Climate Action, it doubled the number of young people who signed up on the action’s Web site. While Al Gore and Thomas Friedman question why young people aren’t doing more to stop global warming, Hansen is in the streets, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, so that the task of protecting future generations isn’t left to them alone.

-----

What was your dream job as a kid?

When I started university, my goal was to be an astronaut, and a scientist astronaut. That’s why I was particularly interested in NASA as a graduate student. Then I got so wrapped up in science that I never got around to becoming an astronaut.

You’ve been called the father of global warming. What does that mean to you and is it actually true?

Of course it’s not true, in the sense that global warming goes way back into the 1800s. The first really good discussion was in the 1860s by John Kendall, who was a British physicist. He speculated that the climate changes from glacial to interglacial were related to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that turned out to be right. We’ve only in the last several years realized and proven that about half of the temperature change in the glacial to interglacial changes is in fact due to changes of greenhouse gases -- mainly carbon dioxide.

So it’s not accurate to say I’m the father of global warming. I think where that misimpression comes from is the fact that the public didn’t pay much attention to this science until the 1980s, when it became much more widely noticed in part because of the testimony I gave in 1988 [to Congress].

What would you say has made you different than many of the climate scientists who came before you?

I guess what seems to have made me different is that I am willing to say a little more bluntly what a lot of scientists are already beginning to think but are a bit reluctant to say publicly or at least not in a clear enough way that the public recognizes what they’re saying.

“You’ve got to cut off the coal source. Not only does Waxman-Markey assure that we will continue to run these coal plants, but it actually gives approval for additional coal plants. That simple test tells us that this bill is not adequate.”

One of the places most recently where you’ve been rather blunt is on the proposed Waxman-Markey climate bill. How would you summarize the problems that you see?

You can summarize the problem and prove that the bill is inadequate in a very simple way. You just look at the geophysical constraints on the problem and you look at how much carbon there is in oil, gas, and coal. And you see that the oil and gas is enough to get us into a dangerous zone for atmospheric carbon dioxide but not so far that we couldn’t solve the problem. But if you add coal and put that carbon in the atmosphere, then there is no practical way to solve the problem. So you just have to look at the proposed policy and see if it allows coal to continue to be used and emit the CO2 in the atmosphere.

You’ve got to cut off the coal source. Not only does [Waxman-Markey] assure that we will continue to run these coal plants that we have but it actually gives approval for additional coal plants. That simple test tells us that this bill is not adequate.

The basic point -- the fundamental problem -- is that because of government policies, fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy. They are not made to pay for the damages they do to human health and the environment. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy, they are going to be used. That’s why I say you have to address the fundamental problem and that is put a rising price on carbon emissions.

You’ve been an advocate for a carbon tax instead of cap-and-trade. Why do you think a carbon tax is not getting much traction?

It’s partly because of the poor choice of words. I have a new description and that is “deposit and return.” Either a carbon cap or a carbon tax affects the price of energy and so they’re qualitatively not different. And so it’s kind of a mistake to call one a “tax and dividend,” and the other a “cap,” as if the cap does not increase the price of energy. If it doesn’t increase the price of energy, then it’s not going to be effective.

We have to begin to move to the sources of energy beyond fossil fuels. And the way you do that in a way that is economically sensible and beneficial is to do it gradually but continually. The public and the business community need to understand that the price of carbon will continue to rise in the future, and then we would begin to move more rapidly to the post-fossil fuel era.

So would it be fair to characterize the Waxman-Markey bill as business-as-usual, or is it even worse than business-as-usual?

Well, it’s a small probation of business-as-usual. It’s worse, in my opinion, than almost no policy because it does lock in, it does give approval for, some new coal-fired power. It puts a ceiling on the reductions that will occur. If you put a price on carbon emissions so that the competitors, the energy efficiency and the carbon-free energy sources, can begin to have the competitive advantage, then once you reach a certain point, things will move very rapidly and we will begin to leave the coal in the ground.

That’s what the coal companies are afraid of and they have been enormously effective in their impact on the politics, even though the truth is it’s not that big an industry and the total number of employees is not that large. But they are very powerful in terms of the number of senators and representatives they are able to influence, and apparently even the administration. It doesn’t make sense from an overall national perspective to give them such tremendous political clout. It is not in the best interest of the nation or the public.

You’ve had more experience than anybody in trying to translate the connection between science and policy. How do you feel President Obama is doing on the climate?

Well, I am disappointed that he has not become a little more involved. He seems to be letting the politics just play out, and perhaps planning to be a judge in the compromises. But it’s a case where we clearly need leadership. And he is still our best hope in achieving that.

What is clear is that we have to phase out the coal, and the place you would start is to say we are going to have a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants. Because when you look at the science, what we’ve shown is that if you phase out coal emissions within 20 years, then you can keep the peak CO2 at something between 400 and 425 ppm. But that is critically dependent on phasing out the coal emissions on that sort of timescale. If you’re going to do that, you would not build any new coal-fired power plants.

But to put a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, Obama would have to contend with the coal state senators and the coal lobby.

Yeah, it’s a nontrivial task. But he could do it, and he is the only one who could do it. Without that, it is just going to be this horse-trading that we’ve seen. And you just keep adding more and more bad things to the bill.

But anyway, you should have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. That is very clear. And mountaintop removal [coal mining], which I understand is only about seven percent of our coal, obviously should be the place you start. I had hoped that the new administration would recognize this and would ban this practice. But again, they seem to be in a position of compromising, of making it a little more difficult but allowing the practice to continue. If [Obama] decided to exert leadership on this, he could. He is articulate enough to explain that to the American public. But so far he is not doing that.

I want to turn to your recent role in some big civil disobedience climate protests: the Capitol climate protest in D.C. last March, and the protest this past June in West Virginia against mountaintop removal coal mining, where you were arrested for the first time. How did somebody who has worked inside the system for so many years get to a place where you decided that you not only had to be out in a protest but that you were going to get arrested?

I prefer the phrase “civil resistance” rather than “civil disobedience” for reasons that Gandhi gives.

When I give a talk on this, I show that the three options for getting the actions that are obviously needed are through the democratic process, influencing the elections of the administration and Congress; secondly, the courts; and then thirdly, civil resistance.

The first at the top of the list, the democratic process: Well, we’re trying that and you have to continue [trying]. It’s very disappointing that the democratic process ends up with the same old politics, which is exactly what Waxman-Markey is. It does not do the job and it is selling short young people and future generations. And that has gotten to be very frustrating to many people, including me.

And so, you look at these other things, the courts and civil resistance. The courts: In my talks, I draw attention to the fact that it has long been a basic tenet in our democracy that the current generation is using nature and the property that we have inherited from our parents in what Thomas Jefferson described in his letter to James Madison as “in usufruct.” Meaning that it’s in trust, it’s property that belongs to future generations, and we’re obligated to deliver it in equally good condition as we received it from our preceding generations. Jefferson was thinking especially about the quality of the land and that you can’t degrade the land with agricultural practices that just use up the nutrients and leave nothing for future generations. So that, I think, may provide a basis for the courts coming to the assistance of young people and future generations. But I don’t know how well that will work out.

So then we arrive at [civil resistance]: I think the point is -- just as Gandhi did -- to try to draw attention to what is just and what is unjust. It is kind of a last resort, but the problem is we are running out of time. That is what science has made very clear. It is very hard for people to understand this because the magnitude of global warming is so small in comparison to weather fluctuations, and yet what has become clear in the last few years is that it doesn’t take a very large global change in order to have enormous implications in the long run.

So then we arrive at civil resistance. I think the point is -- just as Gandhi did -- to try to draw attention to what is just and what is unjust. It is kind of a last resort, but the problem is we are running out of time.”

Do you think, then, that more people should start getting involved in civil resistance, in particular when it comes to stopping coal and mountaintop removal mining?

Yeah. We have got to get Obama to pay attention to this because, as I say, I think he is our best hope. But so far, he seems to be forgetting his obligation to young people.

What do you think we can expect from Copenhagen?

Well, it is the same story as with U.S. policies. We cannot let the governments disguise the effectiveness of the actions they propose to take.

So, for example, in the Kyoto Protocol, that was very ineffective. Even the countries that took on supposedly the strongest requirements, like Japan for example -- if you look at its actual emissions, its actual fossil fuel use, you see that their CO2 emissions actually increased even though they were supposed to decrease. Because their coal use increased and they used offsets to meet their objective.

Offsets don’t help significantly. That’s why the approach that Copenhagen is using to specify goals for emission reductions and then to allow offsets to accomplish much of that reduction is really a fake. And that has to be exposed. Otherwise, just like in the Kyoto Protocol, we’ll realize 10 years later, oops, it really didn’t do much.

What would be less fake?

Again, you have to go back to this basic test. Are you continuing coal emissions?

Because we know nobody is proposing that we are going to stop using the big pools of gas and oil. So therefore you’ve got to cut off the coal. If you want a strategic approach, all you have to do is look at the geophysical boundary conditions, how much carbon you’ve got in these different pools. And if you realize that the oil and gas is going to be used, and you can’t capture the CO2, it’s coming out of tailpipes, you have to cut off the coal.

So, based on science, whether we are talking about U.S. climate legislation or international negotiations, the litmus test for success is whether coal is banned or phased out?

Right. If you don’t do that, you can’t solve the problem. To get there, the most effective policy would be a rising price on carbon emissions. But you also have to have alternative technologies, which can be partially accomplished with energy efficiency, which would be encouraged by a [carbon] price.

What keeps you up at night in terms of the climate?

The fact that the solutions to this problem actually make sense -- they add many other benefits -- we just have to make that clear. Of course, there are special financial interests that would be harmed unless they start investing their money differently, but for the general public, it actually makes sense to move more rapidly beyond fossil fuels.

Energy companies, energy departments, not just the United States, just take it as the God-given fact that we’re going to burn all the fossil fuels. In fact, that doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of the public or the planet. We really should leave the larger part of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, and that means especially coal and unconventional fossil fuels. We just have not succeeded in communicating what I think is clear scientifically. So that’s why I keep working so many hours per week -- to try to help make that clear.

On the flip side, what gives you hope?

Of course, the most recent election in the U.S. gave us all a lot of hope. As I say, we’re disappointed by what’s happened so far, but this is just very early in the Obama administration. He is a smart guy, so I still hope he can realize the interests of young people and future generations above the politics of coal, which is basically the problem right now.

Related Links:

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

First Things First: The Washington-to-Beijing diplomatic shuttle shows no sign of slowing down. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visited China this week to prod collaboration on clean energy technology. Chu announced the U.S. would contribute $15 million to a partnership that will study how to capture carbon dioxide emissions and trap them underground. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blogger Keith Johnson sums up mutual perceptions nicely by citing headlines in his paper (“Chu Warns China on Emissions”) and the China Daily (”Steven Chu: U.S. Ready to Lead on Climate Change”).

The New York Times reports that China is taking the lead on clean energy. The Washington Post surveys business trends there and in other Asian nations, places that “could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill.” A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory official agrees that the U.S. is already left behind in some areas. And the number of U.S. “green jobs” is on the uptick–thanks to enterprising foreign firms.

The U.S. energy industry delivered a surprise this week. Exxon announced a plan to spend $600 million on research into fuel manufactured from algae. These simple plants, which include pond scum and seaweed, are a darling of many scientists and venture capital firms. Exxon’s investment further boosts the fortunes of maverick scientist Craig Venter, whose Synthetic Genomics is a partner in the project. Just a few years ago, Exxon’s previous CEO called ethanol “moonshine,” denigrating such projects, although it should be pointed out that moonshine is largely ethanol.

Count your carbs, count your carbon: Sweden assumed the presidency of the European Union earlier this month. The nation has had a carbon tax since the early 1990s, and continues to take the climate initiative, which now extends to food labeling.

With food or anything else, counting carbs is tricky business. Every facet of the climate story this week demonstrates why. In perhaps the most direct example, the Securities and Exchange Commission will take “a very serious look” at if or how to mandate that publicly traded companies disclose their climate risks.

Elsewhere, economic modeling spats continue. In California, small-business groups funded a study that suggests that, uh, small businesses will lose more than $180 billion in output –10 percent of the total–as a result of the state’s climate law. The California Air Resources Board says the study posits the climate law would bring no savings from increased efficiency or benefits from innovation and entrepreneurship, a supposition that “contradicts the track record of three decades” of state history.

Scientists are in the profession of keeping other scientists honest, theoretically. Computer simulations are such an easy activity to squawk at, scientists themselves do, in the most rarefied places, when they see less-than-rigorous studies published. As commentary on niche modeling, Nature publishes this paper that simulates the effects of climate change on Bigfoot habitats in North America.

The Washington Post runs another op-ed that pretends that climate change does not exist. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pens this op-ed. She writes, “Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas.” Climate Post usually thinks of mountains as solid, oil as liquid, and gas as gas. The latter two phases of matter seem harder to sit on.

Palin quotes Warren Buffett, the famed investor, describing predicted burdens the bill will have on low-income Americans. Buffett himself comes under scrutiny elsewhere. Bloomberg Columnist Eric Pooley untangles the assumptions in Buffett’s statements and those of David Sokol, chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

The next day, the WP ran an editorial supportive of the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last week, possibly to balance the decision to run Palin’s op-ed the day before.  Guardian columnist, and now backseat economist, George Monbiot takes a calculator to the aspirational agreements struck last week among G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and prevent more than two degrees C of warming. The developed world would meet their targets in part by offseting their emissions with credits generated by projects in the developing world. To generate enough offset credits, Monbiot calculates, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions by 125 percent.

Climate legislation allows regulated firms to meet their carbon caps by “offsetting” emissions–buying pollution credits generated by (mostly) forestry and agriculture projects. A comprehensive Greenwire article places offsets within the wider context of how markets can find efficient ways to protect ecosystem services–the many natural processes that clean water, or air, shuttle nutrients about, or cool the climate. Two Nicholas Institute colleagues are cited in the piece.

Summer Days: “Exceptional drought” sears central and southern Texas, draining crops and straining herds. Just one of 12 boat ramps at Lake Travis, near Austin, can reach water, which is down 40 feet. Plus side: Young children can wade safely in nearby river.

Officials, scientists, and at least one reporter in Macon, Georgia, have read the White House’s June report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which predicts a future of twice as many 90-degree days, with the hottest days 10 degrees hotter than usual. “When I read those numbers, I think about what that means to me and my family and my lifestyle, and that’s a very different picture of the South than what I grew up with,” a Georgia Tech scientist said.

The summer sun has desiccated San Joaquin Valley in California, and the U.S. need only look south to consider the effects of poorly managed water.

Dryness is crippling farming in India’s massive farming sector. Bhopal residents, all 1.8 million of them, are allowed 30 minutes of water every other day, in rationing undertaken in October. Downpours and flooding in Mumbai couldn’t help Mumbai, where officials cut water use by 30 percent given a drop in lake levels.

BBC reports from Char Atra, a beleaguered island in the Ganges, where “hardcore poor” residents cope as they can with natural hydrology. Villagers have rebuilt one woman’s home because last year, “there was so much water in her hut that she had to tie her children to their bed at night to stop them from rolling and drowning.”

Does he still count?: Love him or hate him, leading NASA climatologist James Hansen has become an embattled figure. ClimateWire turns in a thoughtful analysis of just how relevant the grandfather of global warming is or isn’t in his activist period, a skeptical complement to the lighter fare published by the New Yorker recently.

Hansen and Al Gore held a colloquium in Hell, which itself, apparently, has seen a 3.8 degree average temperature rise since 1955. “[O]ccupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons,” writes Ian Frazier, a satirist, the New Yorker’s tongue-in-cheek “Shouts and Murmurs column.”

Related Links:

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

A curious thing happened at Tuesday's morning meeting of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee when the panel's infamous climate-change skeptic, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), cited NASA climatologist Jim Hansen in his screed against the House climate bill.

Yes, this is the same James Inhofe who once called climate change the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." And this is the same James Hansen who has been called the "the father of global warming," the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies who has repeatedly called for dramatic action to fight global warming.

Hansen, like Inhofe, is no fan of the Waxman-Markey bill. But for Inhofe -- a global warming denier -- to cite Hansen is irony bordering on satire. Hansen, after all, doesn't think the climate bill that passed in the House last month is strong enough to adequately address the problem of climate change.

Inhofe said at Tuesday's hearing that he agreed with Hansen that the Waxman-Markey bill is "not going to make any change" in the climate. "And he's Mr. Greenhouse Gas," added Inhofe.

In reality, Hansen acknowledges that climate change is caused by man-made, heat-trapping emissions, whereas Inhofe does not. And Hansen has said that he believes steps can be taken by the international community to combat global warming. Inhofe, meanwhile, thinks nothing humans do affect the Earth's climate.

It appears that Inhofe isn't alone. Skeptic Steve Milloy posted a piece on the Green Hell blog on Tuesday titled "Why we should love James Hansen." He argues:

Former Inhofe staffer Marc Morano, who now runs the skeptic site ClimateDepot.com, tweeted the story shortly thereafter: "Go Jim, go! Why we should love James Hansen."

Yes, it appears in denier land, the enemy of your enemy – in this case, the Waxman-Markey bill – is your friend. At least for now.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Two years ago, the nation's top climate scientist wrote, "It seems to me that, as yet, it is difficult to use actions of our government as grounds for civil disobedience, however egregiously stupid those actions are" (see Hansen on "civil disobedience").  But like all of us, his positions have evolved over time.

Author Jeff Biggers reports at HuffingtonPost:

UPDATE: 2:30 EST: 94-year-old Ken Hechler, the legendary West Virginia congressman and coal miner hero who has been battling mountaintop removal since 1971 was arrested in a non-violent protest with NASA's celebrated climate scientist James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah, Michael Brune, the executive director of Rainforest Action Network, and Goldman Prize winner Judy Bonds. Vietnam veteran Bo Webb, and dozens of other coalfield residents were arrested by crossing onto the property of leading mountaintop removal coal mining company, Massey Energy-purposely trespassing to protest the destruction of mountains immediately above the Coal River Valley community.

In the face of recent Obama administration actions to regulate and not abolish mountaintop removal, which has wiped out 500 mountains and destroyed historic communities, the action launched a yearlong national campaign to bring mountaintop removal to an end.

"I am not a politician; I am a scientist and a citizen," said Dr. James Hansen. "Politicians may have to advocate for halfway measures if they choose. But it is our responsibility to make sure our representatives feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is politically expedient. Mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, should be abolished."

Hansen just wrote "A Plea To President Obama: End Mountaintop Coal Mining," in which he said:

The science is clear. Burning all fossil fuels will destroy the future of young people and the unborn. And the fossil fuel that we must stop burning is coal. Coal is the critical issue. Coal is the main cause of climate change. It is also the dirtiest fossil fuel - air pollution, arsenic, and mercury from coal have devastating effects on human health and cause birth defects.

Recently, the administration unveiled its new position on mountaintop coal mining and set out a number of new restrictions on the practice in six Appalachian states. These new rules will require tougher environmental review before blowing up mountains. But it's a minimal step.

The Obama administration is being forced into a political compromise. It has sacrificed a strong position on mountaintop removal in order to ensure the support of coal-state legislators for a climate bill. The political pressures are very real. But this is an approach to coal that defeats the purpose of the administration's larger efforts to fight climate change, a sad political bargain that will never get us the change we need on mountaintop removal, coal or the climate. Coal is the linchpin in mitigating global warming, and it's senseless to allow cheap mountaintop-removal coal while the administration is simultaneously seeking policies to boost renewable energy.

Mountaintop removal, which provides a mere 7 percent of the nation's coal, is done by clear-cutting forests, blowing the tops off of mountains, and then dumping the debris into streambeds - an undeniably catastrophic way of mining. This technique has buried more than 800 miles of Appalachian streams in mining debris and by 2012 will have serious damaged or destroyed an area larger than Delaware. Mountaintop removal also poisons water supplies and pollutes the air with coal and rock dust. Coal ash piles are so toxic and unstable that the Department of Homeland Security has declared that the location of the nation's 44 most hazardous coal ash sites must be kept secret. They fear terrorists will find ways to spill the toxic substances. But storms and heavy rain can do the same. A recent collapse in Tennessee released 100 times more hazardous material than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill.

If the Obama administration is unwilling or unable to stop the massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal, can we honestly believe they will be able to phase out coal emissions at the level necessary to stop climate change? The issue of mountaintop removal is so important that I and others concerned about this problem will engage in an act of civil disobedience on June 23rd at a mountaintop removal site in Coal River Valley, West Virginia.

Experts agree that energy efficiency and carbon-free energies can satisfy our energy needs. Coal left in the ground is useful. It holds up the mountains, which, left intact, are an ideal site for wind energy. In contrast, mountaintop removal and strip mining of coal is a shameful abomination. Mining jobs have shrunk to a small fraction of past levels. With clean energy, there could be far more, green-energy jobs, and the government could support the retraining of miners, to a brighter, cleaner future.

Politicians may have to make concessions on what is right for what is winnable. But as a scientist and a citizen, I believe the right course is very clear: The climate crisis demands a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants that do not capture and safely dispose of all emissions. And mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, should be permanently prohibited.

President Obama remains the best hope, perhaps the only hope, for real change. If the president uses his influence, his eloquence, and his bully pulpit, he could be the agent of real change. But he does need our help to overcome the political realities of compromise.

We must make clear to Congress, to the EPA, and to the Obama administration that we the people want mountaintop removal abolished and we want a move toward a rapid phase-out of coal emissions now. The time for half measures and caving in to polluting industries is over. It is time for citizens to demand - yes, we can.

Readers know that while I don't agree with everything Hansen says, particularly his approach to U.S. climate policy, he remains our top climate scientist, the scientist who has been right in his warnings about global warming longer than just about anybody else.

We need to get off of dirty coal as fast as is humanly possible, literally.

Related Posts:

Related Links:

Prologue to Copenhagen

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Question of the week: Has any Obama administration or West Virginia state official publicly denounced the violence by the mountaintop removal operators this week?

Courtesy Coal River Mountain Watch / Amy SicklesIn last Tuesday's nonviolent march from Marsh Fork Elementary School, which sits downslope of a precarious 2.8 billion gallon coal sludge impoundment, and a Massey Energy coal prep site, a Massey Energy Spousal Group member violently assaulted Goldman Prize Winner and Coal River Mountain Watch Co-Director Judy Bonds. The video of the attack is at the bottom of this post:

Judy Bonds, the victim of the attack and one of the arrestees, later went to the emergency room. Doctors treated her injuries and gave her medicine and orders not to return to work until next week. Coal River Mountain Watch community organizer Lorelei Scarbro, a coal miner's widow, just barely escaped an assault.

While violent attacks by hired thugs are nothing new in the coalfields, this act of violence took place by union-busted Massey Energy supporters, who also used air horns, threatened violence, shouted obscenities and crowded against event attendees, in blatant acts of intimidation.

This begs the question: Why is the Obama administration supporting these violent, union-busting supporters of an outside coal company that has devastated a region with mountaintop removal operations, plundered it for record profits in 2008, and then slashed its union-busted workforce this spring?

“This violent, unprovoked attack demonstrates the tactics Massey will use to silence and intimidate local residents,” Bonds said. “This reminds me of the 1999 reenactment of the Blair Mountain march, in which coal industry supporters kicked, pushed, and spat on Ken Hechler and other marchers, including female senior citizens and me.”

"Is this really how we want to represent West Virginia?" asked Coal River resident Sarah Haltom, one of the arrested protesters. "Gov. Manchin says to 'come home to West Virginia,' but Massey tells us to either go away or shut up about defending our homes from mountaintop removal. My husband and I both received threats of violence during the day."

In a statement sent via email Friday, Dr. James Hansen, who was near Bonds at the time of the attack said, “As for the local people, we found them to be very friendly, and the state police were courteous and professional. Massey employees were out in force making as much noise as possible to try to drown out the speakers at the protest.”

“Pro-mountain community activists adhere to principles of nonviolence, but the coal industry has no such principles,” Coal River resident Vernon Haltom said. “Pro-coal rally speakers have consistently used hostile, aggressive and inflammatory language. Last year we asked Gov. Manchin and others to tone it down. Instead we are subjected to violent attacks with the tacit approval of Manchin, Massey CEO Don Blankenship, West Virginia Coal Association president Bill Raney and United Mineworkers president Cecil Roberts. Not one of them has publicly denounced the violence or called for industry supporters to behave nonviolently.”

For more on Judy Bonds, see: http://crmw.net/

Here's the video:

Related Links:

Prologue to Copenhagen

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

Several people asked for more information about the 23 June civil disobedience near Coal River Mountain. We need Dickens to describe the local situation, but you can glean something from a statement I was reading at the time we were arrested (reprinted below). Local pollution effects and regional environmental destruction should be enough to stop the practice of mountaintop removal. Vernon Haltom, head of Coal River Mountain Watch, provided the details therein. The group can make good use of any support.

The bigger picture, including climate change, makes it clear that mountaintop removal, providing only 7 percent of United States coal, makes no strategic sense whatever. Better leave the coal holding up the mountains. There has to be some leadership from the top. We cannot continue to give President Obama a pass on this much longer. On the other hand, he needs broad support in order to do what is right.

As for the local people, we found them to be very friendly, and the state police were courteous and professional. Massey employees were out in force making as much noise as possible to try to drown out the speakers at the protest. If Gandhi had the sequence right (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win), we are already three-quarters of the way there. I noticed that it was only a handful of Massey people who were really vocal.

But that's not to say that it isn't a dangerous situation for the local people who oppose mountaintop removal -- they are the courageous ones. Some barrel-chested noise-makers seemed pretty close to going over the edge. One of the Massey wives assaulted (sucker-punched) Julia Bonds, Goldman Prize winner for North America and co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch. I went up the mountain with Larry Gibson, who refuses to sell his property, which includes a 200-year-old cemetery containing scores of his relatives. He has been the target of drive-by shootings as recently as last week, and I saw two bullet holes in the side of his house. The FBI should be investigating. On the way down the mountain some thick-necked Massey employees gave us a vigorous one-finger salute -- but others a friendly nod on passing. Larry mentioned that when Bobby Kennedy Jr. looked at the scalped mountain he said, "if any foreign nation had done this to us, we would have declared war on them." Instead what we have in Washington is (coal-fired) senators who advocate for the abominable practice.

Don Blankenship, Massey CEO and seemingly a role model for a few of his employees, suggested he would like to "debate" me about global warming. I agreed to a discussion in which I could make a presentation (on the order of 40 minutes) of the science, and he would have as much time (before or after), followed by discussion and interaction including audience. Mountain State University eagerly agreed to provide the auditorium. It seemed fool-proof, because if Blankenship failed to show, I could give a bit longer talk and have discussion with the audience. But, after I got a room in Beckley, staying an extra day, Blankenship decided he would only do a debate in a television studio with his favorite moderator. When Mountain State University learned what Blankenship's wishes were, they withdrew permission to use their auditorium. I turned on the television news and heard: Blankenship offered to have a discussion with me, but "Dr. Hansen was still trying to check his schedule" -- this was a television station that knew exactly what had actually happened. It seems that even the media is owned by coal.

When the strategic interest of the nation and the world is so clear, can a few gluttons with a few bucks really drive our policy? Does this great country not have better leadership than that?

Here's an op-ed by me on mountaintop removal.

And here's the statement I made at the June 23 rally:

Related Links:

Prologue to Copenhagen

State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?

Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

James Hansen getting arrested on June 23 at an anti-mountaintop-removal protest.Antrim Caskey

Note: This blog will be updated during the day, with dispatches, video and photos being filed by Stephanie Pistello.)

"When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!" -- Mother Jones

UPDATE: "The Sword of Damocles hangs over Marsh Fork Elementary School." "I started out an as activist, but founded it necessary to be a hell raiser. We are going to need hellraisers to stop this devastating practice."--Ken Hechler UPDATE: Video of former US Representative Ken Hechler (D-WV), who introduced the first bill to end mountaintop removal and stripmining in 1971. As a hero to coal miners, Hechler led the campaign for better mining workplace safety and black lung laws and compensation. The 94-year-old Hechler was arrested at the Coal River action, along with coalfield residents and parents, 88-year-old West Virginia activist Winnie Fox, Daryl Hannah, and James Hansen, and Goldman Prize Award winner Judy Bonds, RAN director Michael Brune and many others.

UPDATE: 6pm EST. Goldman Prize Award Winner Attacked. During the rally in front of the Massey Energy coal property today, Coal River Mountain Watch co-director (and 2003 Goldman Prize Award winner) Judy Bonds was reportedly assaulted by a Massey supporter. While Bonds was engaged in a nonviolent protest, the Massey supporter lunged from the line without any provocation and roughly slapped Bonds on the head, ear and jaw. The Massey supporter also attempted an attack on another protestor, Lorelei Scarbro, a coal miner's widow and local community organizer. The Massey supporter was immedidately apprehended by the police and charged with battery, according to news reports. For more information on Judy Bonds, see: http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/84 The crowd included dozens of Mountain Justice participants who have been active in similar protests since 2005, including getting arrested at the same site. (http://mountainjustice.org/)

UPDATE: 2:30 PM EST: Ken Hechler, the 94-year-old legendary West Virginia congressman and coal miner hero who has been battling mountaintop removal since 1971, was arrested in a non-violent protest with NASA's celebrated climate scientist James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah, Michael Brune (the executive director of Rainforest Action Network), Goldman Prize winner Judy Bonds, Vietnam veteran Bo Webb, and dozens of other coalfield residents after they crossed onto the property of leading mountaintop removal coal mining company, Massey Energy --purposely trespassing to protest the destruction of mountains immediately above the Coal River Valley community.

In the face of recent Obama administration actions to regulate and not abolish mountaintop removal, which has wiped out 500 mountains and destroyed historic communities, the action launched a yearlong national campaign to bring mountaintop removal to an end.

"I am not a politician; I am a scientist and a citizen," said Dr. James Hansen. "Politicians may have to advocate for halfway measures if they choose. But it is our responsibility to make sure our representatives feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is politically expedient. Mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, should be abolished."

In an interview posted on Huffington Post last month, Hechler made a special appeal to President Barack Obama to stand by his word and end mountaintop removal. That post is here.

Here is today's scene for the historic nonviolent direct action and march in Coal River Valley, in West Virginia: A 2.8 billion gallon toxic coal sludge impoundment behind the earthen Shumate Dam hovers just a couple of football fields above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, while massive mountaintop removal blasts boom daily within a few feet, and where hundreds of concerned parents, families and citizens from around the country have gathered to call to an end to mountaintop removal--for the sake of the children, the coalfield communities, and the Appalachian mountains.

Actress Darryl Hannah at the June 23 anti-mountaintop-removal protest in West Virginia.Antrim CaskeyAlong with with NASA climatologist James Hansen, long-time environmental activist and actress Daryl Hannah, retired coal miner Chuck Nelson, and many other national environmental and political figures, the rally and march from Marsh Fork Elementary School to a Goals Coal Prep Plant and Massey Energy mountaintop removal site will be joined by two legendary West Virginia titans: 88-year-old activist Winnie Fox, and 94-year-old former US Representative Ken Hechler.

UPDATE from Stephanie Pistello: 1:30pm EST: The state police allowed the coal supporters to line up along the road and then to proceed into playing field to intermingle with activists. The coal supporters are generally being aggressive towards other rally participants and chanting slogans such as "this is our state". The state police have general allowed aggressively (shouting, physical intimidation, standing very near/sitting on vehicals/equipment) activity and only intervene when asked to (including allowing power cords to be ripped out of the wall to silence the PA system). There are around 10 local media outlets on the scene including 2 live broadcast trucks. Several old time bands played from 11 to 12. Speakers started around noon and include Rev. Jim Lewis (who coal supporters taunted and tried to shout down), retired coal miner Chuck Nelson and Appalachian Voices biologist Matt Wasson (former US Rep. Ken Hechler and Daryl Hannah will speak later.)

Over 500 mountains, 1.5 million acres of hardwood forests, and 1,200 miles of streams, along with historic mountain communities, have been destroyed by mountaintop removal. In a study the last fall by the Ashby-Tucker environmental firm, air quality experts found that the coal dust blanketing the Marsh Fork Elementary School exceeded accepted limits.

According to the study, Dr. D. Scott Simonton reported: "My concern about the school is that dust levels not only appear to exceed human health reference levels, but that the dust is largely made up of coal. Coal dust contains silica, trace metals, and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), many of which are known human carcinogens. PAH’s have been found in dust samples taken at the school. Inhalation of coal dust is known to cause adverse health effects in humans, however, studies of coal dust toxicity are understandably mostly of adult populations. Children are particularly at risk from dust exposure in general, so it is reasonable to assume that coal dust creates an even greater risk for children than it does adults. The sampling to date certainly indicates that dust levels and composition at the school reach a level of concern. Particulate matter at levels found at the school has been shown to cause adverse effects in children."

According to the evacuation plans, if the Shumate Dam and coal sludge impoundment failed--as happened in eastern Kentucky in 2000 and at the TVA coal ash pond--the school children and communities below would have THREE MINUTES to flee.

Over 500 mountains, 1.5 million acres of hardwood forests, and 1,200 miles of streams, along with historic mountain communities, have been destroyed by mountaintop removal. Antrim CaskeyBorn in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, Winnie Fox's first protest took place in 1930, when she insisted on drinking from a segregated water foundation in Huntington, West Virginia, where her family moved when she was a child. A former board director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (ohvec.org)--one of the main organizations in the battle against mountaintop removal--Fox has been involved in stopping reckless pollution in the rivers and watersheds for decades, dating back to her earliest movement against Ashland Oil's pulp mill dumping of toxic material in the waterways.

Fox will be in a wheelchair today, but that will not stop her from risking arrest at the coal prep plant and Massey Energy site.

In a 2007 interview with Shannon Bell, Fox declared that her battle against mountaintop removal would be a lifelong commitment: "I would never give up, I will never stop. Because to me, that would be betraying everything that I am and everything I’ve ever been and everything I ever hoped to be. And I’ve seen too much suffering by these women [who are involved]. Too many sad stories."

Actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah will speak at the Educational Rally on Sustainable Solutions for West Virginia at the Marsh Fork Elementary School today.

Hannah lives on a solar-powered ranch in the Rocky Mountains in the West. In an interview with the Central Florida Green Guide, Hannah said: "It’s a small but beautiful house made with salvaged materials. It’s both passive and active solar, meaning it faces southwest. It is bermed into the landscape and uses the natural movement of the sun and the insulation of the earth to heat/cool the structure."

Hannah is a long-time activist with various environmental groups and Greenpeace, and host of her own environmental blog -- www.dhlovelife.com

Here's a clip from the Sundance Channel about her work for solar energy.

Dr. James Hansen, the nation's foremost expert on climate change, will not only risk arrest today, but has agreed to debate Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship on the reality of climate change.

"Stopping coal emissions is 80 percent of the solution to climate change, and halting mountaintop removal is the essential, rational first step," Hansen wrote. "Any politician who claims to support our children and the environment, but also supports mountaintop removal, is either a fool, a liar, or both."

Hansen recently published a piece on Huffington Post on mountaintop removal and his decision to come to Coal River Valley.

And as the rally unfolds today, here's a clip of Marie Gunnoe, the recent Goldman Prize Award winner, whose own home and hollow has been been stripmined, and subjected to flooding seven times, describing the disastrous realities of the coal sludge dam above the elementary school and mountaintop removal blasting.

While the rally at Marsh Fork Elementary School and the nonviolent march continues today, it is important to recall a similar moment in West Virginia in 1923, when coal miners went out on strike. Chicago-native Mary "Mother" Jones arrived to support the miners. Her appeal to the West Virginia governor to support striking coal miner is a haunting parallel to today's West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, who has refused to deal with the Marsh Fork Elementary School, despite the health care studies and parent complaints and campaigns.

"Governor," I said, Mother Jones wrote in her autobiography,"listen-do you hear anything?"

He listened a moment.

"No, Mother Jones, I do not."

"I do," said I. "I hear women and little boys and girls..."

The boys and girls of Marsh Fork Elementary School, and the coalfield communities, along with Americans across the country, are calling on the West Virginia governor, the EPA, the Council for Environmental Quality, and President Barack Obama to listen.

More updates to come.

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Prologue to Copenhagen

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist[Updated: June 1, 2009]

The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, now moving through the House, is polarizing the environmental community. Longtime climate crusader Al Gore says we should do all we can to get the legislation passed; top climate scientist James Hansen says we should demand a different, better bill. Activists and environmental groups are picking sides or staking out positions in the middle.

“I think they’ve maintained the integrity of the bill. In its current form as I understand it, I have no doubt that it will accomplish the result we need to begin this transition toward renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and renewed U.S. leadership in global negotiations.”
-- Al Gore

Gore says the bill is a good starting point, and that efforts to reach compromise on it have boosted its chances of passing both the House and the Senate. “The key role of the legislation is to begin that shift [to lower emissions],” he said. “Once it begins, it will be unstoppable.”

On Gore's team:

Arguments in favor of the bill:

“The revised Waxman-Markey climate bill is too watered down to qualify as a positive step for avoiding catastrophic climate disruption.”
-- James Hansen

Hansen proposes instead a “tax and dividend” approach that would tax fossil fuels at the point of extraction and distribute the revenue from that tax to citizens. That's just one of many approaches being promoted by bill opponents.

On Hansen's team:

Arguments against the bill:

Many environmental groups are calling for lawmakers to "strengthen and support" the bill -- but if the bill isn't strengthened, or if it's actually weakened further, it's unclear whether they'll support it. (Some organizations are simultaneously saying "vote yes" and "fix it," so we've listed them as both on Gore's team and in the middle; we welcome clarification from any group on its team of choice.)

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond

Fourteen Democratic senators stick up for coal

Carbon emissions pricing met its first big electoral test this week, as British Columbia voters rewarded BC premier Gordon Campbell, who last July instituted North America's first major carbon tax, with a third four-year term.

News service AFP reported that with more than 60 percent of the votes counted, Campbell's Liberal Party held a 46-42 lead over the opposition New Democratic Party, whose leader, Carole James, denounced the carbon tax throughout the two-month campaign and promised to replace it with a cap-and-trade scheme.

Elections aren't referenda, as I hastened to note when the Liberals were routed in Canada's national election last fall. But that outcome was tied to the Liberal candidate's hapless campaign style, compounded by his backing away from the carbon tax plank in his party platform. In the BC campaign Campbell stood squarely behind his carbon tax. Indeed, voters appear to have rewarded the Liberals for sticking to principle as much as for the substance of the carbon tax itself.

Here's how AFP put it (emphases added):

The contrast with the U.S. is stark. Not a single governor here publicly backs a carbon tax. Few of the major environmental organizations have anything positive to say about a national carbon tax, and most are still cheerleading for the carbon cap-and-trade alternative no matter how loose the cap or polluter-friendly the trading.

The BC carbon tax that took effect on July 1, 2008 is modest, equating to just $7.50-$8.00 (U.S.) per ton of CO2. However, it is to rise each year through 2012, reaching the U.S. equivalent of around $11.75/ton on July 1 and, in July 2012, around $23.50.

A U.S. carbon tax at that level would raise petrol prices by approximately 23 cents a gallon and national-average electricity prices by around 1.7 cents a kilowatt-hour. (Virtually all power generation in British Columbia is hydro-electric, so their carbon tax effectively exempts electricity.) The BC tax is revenue-neutral, with revenues returned to taxpayers through personal income and business income tax cuts.

In a recent e-mail to the Carbon Tax Center, American climatologist and climate campaigner James Hansen said, "The important thing is to get on the right policy track at the beginning - the policy must attack the fundamental problem, that dirty fossil fuels are the cheapest energy because they are not made to pay their costs to society."

Yes, carbon taxes must reach high levels and go global quickly. But for now let's celebrate that the first major jurisdiction - and party - to choose the right policy track has seen its vision recognized and its courage rewarded.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

I got a lot of responses to my first Memo to James Hansen on his ill-conceived and unhelpful opposition to Waxman-Markey.  Needless to say, it gives me no joy to criticize the nation’s top climate scientist, a man who inspired me to write my book and this blog, a man whose work is reprinted more than anyone else’s on this blog (see partial list of links at the end).

I discuss below what we can learn from the experience with the global effort to save the ozone layer, which also began with a far-too-weak effort that was strengthened over time, much as I expect a U.S. climate bill like Waxman-Markey will be.

But first:  I wasn’t going to post again on Hansen, but then I saw that WattsUpWithThat, perhaps the country’s top anti-science blog, had reposted Hansen’s entire new attack on cap-and-trade (see Jim Hansen calls Cap and Trade the “Temple of Doom”).

Now Anthony Watts is one of the hard-core deniers.  Not content to simply dispute the science with disinformation, he publishes and republishes attacks on climate scientists like Hansen himself.  Indeed Watts said ealier this year that Hansen is “no longer a scientist” and called on NASA to fire Hansen.  But then Watts routinely smears all climate scientists, approvingly reprinting denier manifestos that claim global warming “is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind” — see Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS).

To all those who think my post or my word choice was inapproprite, I ask, what exactly should I do when someone like Hansen publishes a post titled “Worshipping the Temple of Doom“?   He uses language that is more appropriate for attacks on deniers than on the many serious people struggling to craft a politically possible piece of energy and climate legislation:

Cap-and-trade is the temple of doom. It would lock in disasters for our children and grandchildren. Why do people continue to worship a disastrous approach? Its fecklessness was proven by the Kyoto Protocol. It took a decade to implement the treaty, as countries extracted concessions that weakened even mild goals. Most countries that claim to have met their obligations actually increased their emissions. Others found that even modest reductions of emissions were inconvenient, and thus they simply ignored their goals.

Why is this cap-and-trade temple of doom worshipped? The 648 page cap-and-trade monstrosity that is being foisted on the U.S. Congress provides the answer. Not a single Congressperson has read it. They don’t need to – they just need to add more paragraphs to support their own special interests. By the way, the Congress people do not write most of those paragraphs – they are “suggested” by people in alligator shoes.

Seriously.  Waxman-Markey was mostly written by people in alligator shoes?  Not.

Again, I repeat, Nobelist Al Gore, who also embraces a 350 ppm target like Hansen, combines political realism with his climate science realism, which is why he takes the exact opposite view that Hansen does — see Gore on Waxman-Markey: “One of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in the Congress … has the moral significance” of 1960s civil rights legislation and Marshall Plan.

Again, I simply don’t believe that Hansen is in a position to criticize anybody because he refuses to put forward a policy solution that would achieve 350 ppm (see “An open letter to James Hansen on the real truth about stabilizing at 350 ppm”).

Note Hansen’s core criticism:

The only defense of this monstrous absurdity that I have heard is “well, you are right, it’s no good, but the train has left the station”. If the train has left, it had better be derailed soon or the planet, and all of us, will be in deep do-do. People with the gumption to parse the 648-pages come out with estimates of a price impact on petrol between 12 and 20 cents per gallon. It has to be kept small and ineffectual, because they want to claim that it does not affect energy prices!

I must say that is just very, very naive or disingenuous, as I argued in Part 1.

Jim:  The reason the carbon price resulting from Waxman-Markey in, say, 2020 is going to be low has NOTHING to do with the fact that the bill is 648 pages long or that it utilizes the cap-and-trade approach. It has everything to do with the fact that the country lacks the political will for stronger action (thanks to the massive disinformation campaign, a feckless media, and poor messaging by scientists [not you], progressives, and environmentalists).

If Congress passed a carbon tax, it would have the same low carbon price and would ratchet up as slowly as under Waxman-Markey.

[As an aside, it is all but inconceivable that a carbon price will drive up the price of gasoline to get the kind of reductions needed in oil use (see EDF’s bizarre $10,000 contest: “What is a carbon cap and how will it cure our oil addiction?”).  Your own published work on the subject assumes, correctly, that peak oil will "deal" with conventional oil.]

Hey, does anybody know a great communicator, who might level with the public, explain
what is needed to break our addiction to fossil fuels, to gain energy independence, to assure a
future for young people? Who would explain what is really needed, rather than hide behind
future “goals” and a gimmick “cap”? Naw. Roosevelt and Churchill are dead. So is Kennedy.

Sigh.

You can read Hansen’s entire critique of cap-and-trade in his letter to Dr. Martin Parkinson, Secretary of the Australian Department of Climate Change.  I am sympathetic to many of his concerns, but most of them if not all of them would apply equally well to a politically plausible “simple carbon tax” bill as I argued in Part 1.

Again, Waxman-Markey is not going to get us to 350 ppm or 45o ppm.  But let me reprint what I wrote in Salon about the Montreal Protocol:

HOW WE SAVED THE OZONE LAYER

In 1974, climate scientists warned us that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the earth’s ozone layer, threatening to bring about a sharp increase in skin cancer. Within five years, the United States voluntarily banned their use in spray cans, and CFC production began to decline. But other uses for CFCs, as refrigerants and solvents, began driving up the demand again by the early 1980s.

In 1985, scientists discovered a hole in the ozone shield over Antarctica. As the National Academy of Sciences wrote, this was “the first unmistakable sign of human-induced change in the global environment period … Many scientists greeted the news with disbelief. Existing theory simply had not predicted it.”

Chlorine concentrations had been increasing over Antarctica for decades, up from the natural level of 0.6 parts per billion. Yet as Richard Benedick, President Ronald Reagan’s chief ozone negotiator, explained in a 2005 Senate hearing, “No effect on the ozone layer was evident until the concentration exceeded two parts per billion, which apparently triggered the totally unexpected collapse.” His ominous lesson for today: “Chlorine concentrations had tripled with no impact whatsoever on ozone until they crossed an unanticipated threshold.” The earth’s climate system is approaching many such thresholds faster than expected, which is why climate scientists are desperate that humanity act now.”

The stunning revelation of an ozone hole drove the world to negotiate the Montreal Protocol. The 1987 agreement called for a 50 percent cut in CFC production by 1999. Significantly, the protocol’s targets and timetables slowed the rate of growth of concentrations only slightly and would have still led to millions of extra skin cancer cases by midcentury. Further, the protocol allowed developing countries to delay implementing the control measures for about 10 years. It also required rich countries to give developing ones access to alternative chemicals and technologies, together with financial aid.

Nevertheless, President Reagan endorsed the protocol, and the Senate ratified it. By the end of 1988, 29 countries and the European Economic Community — but not China or India — had ratified it. The treaty came into effect the next year. But it took many more years of negotiations, continuous strengthening of the scientific consensus, and significant concessions to developing countries before amendments to the treaty were strong enough and had enough support from both rich and poor countries to ensure that CFC concentrations in the air would be reduced.

The analogy of the ozone layer and the Montreal Protocol to global warming and the UNFCCC process from Kyoto to Copenhagen is far from perfect — greenhouse gases are more integral to modern life than CFCs ever were. American politics has changed in two decades, and conservatives would no doubt unanimously oppose the Montreal Protocol today, especially without ratification by China and India. Yet this small first step by the rich nations jump-started a multiyear process that saved the ozone layer and prevented millions of cases of skin cancer.

So yes, I support the Waxman-Markey approach, warts and all, as a crucial first step for this country.  I’d like to see the bill strengthened now, but I’m certain it will be strengthened over the next decade and then strengthened again.  And again.  Supporters of it are not worshiping at the Temple of Doom.  They, like Gore, match scientific realism with political realism.

Related Links:

The night I slept with Jim Hansen

EPA demands attorneys remove video critical of cap-and-trade

Groups use 350’s big day to fight cap-and-trade

Climate Wire (subs. req’d) reports today:

NASA’s leading climate scientist says he hopes that climate legislation proposed by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman (CA) and Edward Markey (MA) to introduce carbon emissions trading to the United States fails. He says lawmakers should abandon cap-and-trade initiatives altogether and implement a simple carbon tax instead….

“Trading of rights to pollute … introduces speculation and makes millionaires on Wall Street,” Hansen said in his keynote lecture at Columbia University’s 350 Climate Conference held here Saturday. “I hope cap and trade doesn’t pass, because we need a much more effective approach.”

Hansen also stands opposed to so-called “cap and dividend” proposals that would introduce pollution trading and a near full auctioning of emissions, with proceeds from the auctions going back to the public. Instead, Hansen proposed a “tax and dividend” approach to tax fossil fuels at the point where they are extracted from the ground, to set a firm price on carbon. Proceeds from the tax, rather than from the auctioning of allowances, would then be distributed to consumers.

“It could be implemented in one year, as opposed to decades with cap and trade,” he said. “The bureaucracy is very simple.”

Why oh why do even smart people like NASA’s James Hansen think that there is such a thing as a “simple carbon tax”? Have you folks ever looked at the friggin’ tax code?

Seriously, nothing bugs me more than this notion that Congress would ever pass a “simple” carbon tax, even if it were politically feasible, which it most certainly is not. Well, one thing bugs me more — people who attack the first serious chance we have to get major energy and climate legislation because they are operating under the severe misimpression that the political system of this country might embrace a tax.

Nobelist Al Gore, who also embraces a 350 ppm target like Hansen, combines political realism with his climate science realism, which is why he takes the exact opposite view that Hansen does — see Gore on Waxman-Markey: “One of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in the Congress … has the moral significance” of 1960s civil rights legislation and Marshall Plan.

Let’s be very clear here, since there are obviously a great many smart people who keep pushing a carbon tax instead of cap-and-trade, who are wasting a lot of time tilting at windmills, so to speak, when they should be building them instead (with the help of Waxman-Markey):

Let me elaborate on these points.

1. A carbon tax, particularly one capable of deep emissions reductions quickly, is a political dead end. There simply aren’t any major politicians — in office – who support one. So I’m not certain who is going to introduce this imaginary “simple carbon tax” as a bill, and I’m quite certain very few are going to vote for it. The Obama administration campaigned on a cap-and-trade, and they are the only ones who can change the direction of US climate policy, the only ones who could move us to a tax. Since they aren’t going to do that, it is a monumental waste of everyone’s time for people like Hansen to rail against cap-and-trade. You might as well howl at the moon or look for gold at the end of the rainbow.

The weird thing to me is not that Hansen refuses to combine policy/political realism with climate science realism. He is, after all, a climate scientist — the one I admire most greatly (see “American Meteorological Society gives James Hansen its top honor“) — and not a politician. The weird thing to me is that Hansen refuses to be internally consistent and advocate policies that match his scientific statements. I have blogged on this at great length here: “An open letter to James Hansen on the real truth about stabilizing at 350 ppm.”

Let me repeat the key point: It is utterly inconceivable that you could stabilize atmospheric concentrations anywhere near 350 ppm by using a carbon price as your primary mechanism.

A price isn’t what is needed to stop building any new coal plants and shut down every existing one in 10 years in rich countries and 20 years everywhere else — and replace all that power (plus growth) with carbon-free generation and efficiency. Plus you have to build all the necessary transmission.

Indeed, I can’t imagine how high a price would be needed but it is probably of the order of $1000 a ton of carbon or more starting in 2010. Talk about shock and awe. Remember, we are talking about a carbon price so high that it actually renders coal plants that have been completely paid for uneconomic to run. And once you stop new demand and start shutting down existing plants, the price of coal will collapse to almost nothing.

Once you start building all of the alternatives at this unimaginable pace, bottlenecks in production and material supply will run up their costs. The collapse in coal prices, making existing plants very cheap to run, together with the run up in the price of all alternatives will force carbon prices even higher.

But, in any case, if you want to replace all those existing coal plants with carbon free power that fast, again the carbon price is almost beside the point. How are you going to site and build all the alternative plants that fast? How are you going to site and build all the power lines that quickly? How are you going to allocate the steel, cement, turbines, etc? How are you going to train all the people needed to do all this?

There is only one way. That is a WWII-style and WWII-scale government-led mobilization. As Hansen and his coathors conclude in their landmark paper (see “Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al“):

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II.

Well, we didn’t accomplish the WWII mobilization through a pricing mechanism. So if you support 350 ppm — and as readers know, I have various issues with that target — then you need to be honest with the public about what the right policy approach is and not go about A) offering policy proposals that won’t get you 350 and B) criticizing others who may not embrace your target for advancing a different approach that also won’t achieve 350 ppm.

2. A carbon tax that could pass Congress would not be simple. I would have thought this was obvious were it not for the large number of very smart people who believe otherwise. Again, look at the U.S. tax code. Let’s also look at what happened with the BTU tax. There were granted:

… a steady string of energy-tax exemptions to key lawmakers, special pleaders and important industries. Farmers won exemptions on diesel fuel for tractors. Majority Leader George Mitchell won an exemption for home heating oil, an important commodity in New England. Clinton himself agreed in an April telephone call (from a Congressman at a pay phone in Oklahoma) to change the way the tax would be collected on natural gas, electricity and oil.

And as for rip-offsets, strong political forces are insisting upon a cap-and-trade system that includes large amounts of offsets to substitute for a fraction of the emissions permits/allowances that carbon-emitters need to buy. I am not a fan of rip-offsets (see “The one simple change that could vastly improve Waxman-Markey: Sunset the rip-offsets“) — although they are not as bad as many people think, as I will discuss in later posts.

But why wouldn’t those same strong political forces insist that carbon-emitters be able to pay some of their carbon tax through the purchase of offsets? It would be very “simple” to introduce that into this imaginary carbon tax bill. But it would create a bureaucracy comparable to the one needed for Waxman-Markey.

It’s the golden rule, folks. If you have the gold — in this case, the lucre from selling unsustainable, polluting energy — you get to write some of the rules.

And if Hansen thinks that it would be politically possible to raise carbon prices that high without diverting some of the money to affected industries, again, I’m not certain what country he is living in.

And again a carbon price isn’t going to solve the problem by itself. You need a bunch of complementary measures that complicate the legislation. I have been meaning to write about a recent Carnegie Mellon University report that came to that exact conclusion, but until I get around to that, you can look at the Green Car Congress piece on it, “CMU Paper: Market-Based Mechanisms for CO2 Reduction Will Be Insufficient to Attain Mid-Century Goals.”

Hansen sort of acknowledges this:

But ultimately, an effective response to climate change will require a variety of actions, he argued. That includes a new, much stronger international agreement, action by U.S. lawmakers to finally put a price on carbon through a tax, and new policies designed to ultimately phase out fossil fuel consumption.

“We’re going to have to make the decision to leave coal in the ground” or burn it only at power plants utilizing carbon capture and sequestration technology, Hansen said. “Perhaps the best chance is in the courts,” he added.

Courts? Yeah, that’ll get it done in the time frame needed.

Fine, “we need new policies designed to ultimately phase out fossil fuel consumption.” Waxman-Markey isn’t perfect, but it has some of those policies and it’s a start.

3. A carbon tax is woefully inadequate and incomplete as a climate strategy. Let me just focus on one issue here — the need for targets and timetables. A climate bill must have binding targets and timetables if it is to achieve any desired emissions or concentration goal. That is especially true because we need to have a credible piece of legislation to convince the rest of the world that we are serious about emissions reduction.

Thus the “simple carbon tax” bill would have to have binding, specified targets and timetables similar to (if not stronger than) Waxman-Markey. It would have to have some sort of mechanism for constantly adjusting the tax to make sure emissions goals were being met. The obvious mechanism is to simply auction the permits and let the market decide what the price is. Otherwise, you have to develop an equally complicated bureaucracy that keeps changing the carbon price based on past performance and that keeps trying to guess what future price is needed to achieve the binding targets and timetables.

So again, whatever this carbon tax bill would be — at the end of the day it would probably look a lot like a cap-and-trade system with exceptions and allocations for certain industries, international and domestic offsets, various complementary measures like energy efficiency standards, and some complicated oversight board but constantly adjusted the price.

I can appreciate Hansen’s frustration with the politics and bureaucracy surrounding a cap-and-trade. But I think that is far more an inevitable outcome of the nature of this legislation and the nature of our political process than it is inherent in the policy measure. And the notion that the political system would somehow accept a much higher price of carbon through a tax bill but not a cap-and-trade bill is, again, naive.

The Climate Wire story notes:

Public remains apathetic about climate Hansen also said climate activists need to be more vocal and strategic in getting the public to lobby harder for action to reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. He pointed to recent public opinion polls showing that among Americans’ concerns, climate change ranks nearly last in the order of priority, well behind the economy and the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

“It’s hard for people to realize that we have a crisis, because you don’t see much happening,” he said. “If people understood the implications for their children and grandchildren, they would care.”

Well, again, a surefire way to make sure that you don’t see much happening is to keep campaigning against Waxman-Markey, because that is the only serious comprehensive energy and climate legislation around.

Hansen also urged conference participants to press the United States to negotiate a robust international agreement by the final negotiating round of U.N. climate change talks this year at Copenhagen. He said the new agreement has to be much more far reaching than the Kyoto Protocol, which he deems to have been entirely ineffective, and the Copenhagen talks should emphasize action by the United States and China.

I can’t argue with that, except to say that the world would be much happier — much more willing to join us in climate action — if we passed something like Waxman-Markey than if we passed the imaginary simple carbon tax.

No, Waxman-Markey won’t get us to 350-450 ppm, but it takes us off of the business as usual path, which is the most important thing, and it accelerates the transition to a clean energy economy, which is the second most important thing, and it establishes a framework that can be tightened as reality and science render inevitable. That is, after all, the same way we saved the ozone layer. The original Montréal protocol provisions would not have done so. But they got tightened overtime.

Hansen is right that it can take a few years (not decades) to establish a cap-and-trade system. That’s why we need to start now.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

60 Minutes had a long segment on the problem of coal this weekend. Watch:

A couple thoughts on this.

First, it's worth stepping back and noting how far the discussion has come. The coal industry probably views this segment as disastrous -- it takes for granted that climate change is happening and that coal is a, in fact the, big driver. The industry has lost the denial fight and can no longer hide outside the public spotlight. So we've come a long way.

But more striking to me is where the discussion still stops short. We hear from James Hansen that to preserve a livable climate, we have to put a moratorium on new coal plants and phase out existing coal plants in 20 years. Then the discussion turns to the feasibility of cleaning up coal.

A Martian dropping in to watch this segment might say, wait a minute! What about what Hansen said? Can we do that?

But the subject goes almost entirely unaddressed. Jim Rogers -- the CEO of a coal utility! -- says passingly that he can't do it, and then the focus turns to preserving the role of coal.

But can we? Can we phase out coal and maintain a modern economy? I hate even to say that 60 Minutes producers assumed the answer is no. It seems, rather, that it just never occurs to them to seriously ask the question.

This is symptomatic of a much larger phenomenon. It's a hole in the heart of the ongoing energy/climate discussion: the possibility of a prosperous, fossil-free, low-carbon economy. Of course there are plenty of reports showing how it could happen: Here's a detailed plan to meet America's energy needs without new coal plants, using a combination of efficiency and clean renewable power. Here's another, another, another, another, and more. Just a few weeks ago the Department of Interior released a study showing that offshore wind alone could satisfy U.S. electricity needs.

But for whatever reason, that possibility is not alive in the public discussion. And it's having awful effects. When you hear coal-state Dems push to weaken the short-term targets in the Waxman/Markey bill, what they're thinking is, we need to align the targets with the projected availability of coal with sequestration. Pushing targets faster than that will only jack up prices. Because there's no alternative. Again, this is not a "position" they have, the outcome of an investigation. It's an absence: the absence of a real, live alternative future. They can't see it. They don't know how to think about it.

This is absolutely the No. 1 priority for all climate/energy crusaders: not the science of climate change, not the evils of fossil fuels, but a real effort to paint a credible picture of a low-carbon, fossil-free future that everyone can participate in.

Related Links:

Prologue to Copenhagen

Soil carbon—a blind spot in the debate on carbon

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

A strange-bedfellows political coalition, everyone from the CEO of Exxon to climate scientist James Hansen, supports a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade. Tax proponents allege that cap-and-trade is too complicated; too friendly to financial industry tricks and manipulations; too open to loopholes, cheating, and special pleading; too weak to work.

This is all true. Or rather, could be true, if special interests are given too influential a voice in the process; if there is no organized grassroots movement applying pressure; if the legislators developing the policy allow it to happen.

The thing is, the same flaws could just as easily weaken a carbon tax. Just because it looks elegant sketched on an economist's whiteboard doesn't mean a tax can't be corrupted in the real-world political process. (Have a quick look at the U.S. tax code.)

To boot, taxes of any kind are notoriously unpopular among the U.S. electorate.

It's an article of faith among supporters that returning the revenue to taxpayers via rebates could bring public support around behind a tax, despite the fact that just such a refunded tax was roundly rejected in Canada last year. Despite the fact that a comprehensive new survey out of Yale (PDF) asked a representative sample of over 2,000 people what means they favored to fight climate change and a fully refunded gasoline tax came in dead last. Despite the lack of any real empirical evidence that taxes can be rendered popular with promises of rebates.

Pricing carbon will be a fraught political battle, in danger of being corrupted or dying in Congress. That's true whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax on the table.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

After ducking the matter for a decade, U.S. environmental organizations finally pulled together a climate policy, but the National Call to Action on Global Warming issued by 53 organizations on March 5 is a mistake and should be reconsidered.

The National Call contains key elements that have been startlingly absent from our efforts to date -- an assessment of climate risk, bright-line definition of solution, and a platform -- but in attempting to thread a path between fundamentally irreconcilable political worldviews, the groups have fashioned a pushmepullyou compromise that will not gain us the traction we now require and squanders moral capital won at cost.

The National Call was hurried into place when it became clear that the irredeemably flawed cap-and-trade agenda of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership would otherwise be adopted by default. Yet, instead of coming down emphatically, if belatedly, behind Jim Hansen's precautionary analysis and focusing on the central questions facing humanity -- "how bad is it?" how much time do we have left?" and "what do we have to do to avert cataclysm?" -- our major organizations choose to fudge the science and aim for something much smaller then the reordering of civics, economy, and society required to avert cataclysm.

What could and should be an illuminating, spirited civic debate between two sharply defined and fundamentally contradictory worldviews is now muddied by the introduction of a confused and confusing middle road position advanced by respected climate leaders. Split into three camps, we are further than ever from sharpening our story and worse off then before the National Call was issued.

No attempt was made to hide the illogic of the National Call, which claims to stand on "climate science" yet recommends inadequate, lower-end IPCC targets based on essentially antique science which does not fully encompass the risk of abrupt climate change. A bland statement acknowledging this fact ("more recent findings since the publication of the latest IPCC assessment suggest that even more urgent action may be needed") is included in the Call without clarification or conclusion.

This throwaway statement, however, is the nub of the matter, because all recent evidence on factors affecting the pace and scale of ice shelf break-up in Antarctica and Greenland -- the climate change "world killer" -- is very, very grim, and all projections of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions continue to rise steeply. It could not be clearer that we are running the last lap and there will be no opportunity for "do-overs."

What's going on here? None of our organizations and leaders truly disagree with the precautionary position as a matter of science, so why did 53 sign on to an statement calling for less than we know is now necessary to avert catastrophe?

Six organizations -- 350.org, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Friends of the Earth (FOE), International Rivers Network (IRN), GlobalWarmingSolution.org and, contrary to original reports, Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection -- did not endorse the National Call and there are indications that the decision does not sit comfortably with every group which did. People should be worried, because the National Call puts the majority of our organizations on the same slippery track that compromised the integrity of EDF and NRDC.

I have a half-formed idea that the critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it. If so, then there is no reason at this stage to support inadequate compromises that cannot avert cataclysm and will merely run out the clock. We're playing winner take all now.

If one cannot imagine a new American revolution, or shudders at the thought, then I suppose there is appeal in cutting the best deal going and hoping that Hansen et al. are wrong, but as a matter of strategy, it's still the bad move. Whether or not "non-linear" social change is thought likely or desirable, driving toward it improves the outcome either way.

Environmentalist power is proportional to our moral authority, not our facility at brokering, and our moral authority is diminished when we speak less then the truth. The National Call to Action on Global Warming, relying on out of date IPCC science, is knowingly built on a foundation of sand. It reduces our moral authority (and we ought to start thinking about our members, donors, and staff in this regard) and should be reconsidered.

Having won consensus for joint action -- a tremendous step forward -- we must assert the new power that can and should have flowed from the achievement, and the best way to do so is by endorsing Jim Hansen's call for a 300-350 ppm bright line. If we do this, then we act as a responsible movement, coalescing behind two opposed visions of political change and measures of appropriate precautionary behavior. If we do not do this, we churn already muddy waters and are worse off then if we had done nothing.

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COPENHAGEN—Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut more quickly and deeply than thought only two years ago to avoid dire consequences, and a straight-up carbon tax is the only realistic way to do it, top climate scientist James Hansen said in an interview.

  New research paints an even gloomier picture of global warming than the already grim report put out in early 2007 by the U.N.‘s Nobel-winning scientific panel, he told AFP at the margins of a major climate conference.

  Director since 1981 of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen made headlines worldwide in 1988 with his U.S. Congress testimony that climate change was already well under way, a finding highly contested at the time.

  “What we have realized is that the dangerous level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is much lower than what we thought a few years ago,” he said.

  To prevent a devastating maelstrom of drought, extreme weather, famine and forced migration by century’s end, the concentration of CO2 will have to be kept under 350 parts per million (ppm), he said.

  “We are actually going to have to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,” he added, noting that the current level—still rising—is 385 ppm.

  The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had suggested that a ceiling of 450 ppm would be enough to forestall the worst effects of climate change.

  Hansen’s argument is a simple as it is sobering: continuing to drain Earth’s store of fossil fuels—oil, gas and coal—will lead humanity straight toward climate calamity.

  Only an abrupt and profound change in the way we consume energy can stop the global warming juggernaut.

  A cap-and-trade system, under which progressively stricter “polluting right” exchanged in a carbon market, is likely to be reinforced at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen this December as the favored approach to slashing greenhouse gases.

  The system is already in practice in the European Union, and has been proposed by U.S. President Barack Obama for the United States.

  But Hansen is highly sceptical that it can work.

  “It takes about 10 years to negotiate it and get all the countries on board, and then you make all sort of compromises, so it turns to be very ineffectual,” he said.

  “If it’s going to be cap and trade, I’d rather nothing came out of Copenhagen. I’d rather take another year and two and get it right.”

  The fact that prices in the E.U. carbon market have plummeted due to the global economic crisis lends weight to Hansen’s doubts.

  What would work, he argues, is a direct tax—as close to the source as possible—on fossil fuels.   “A carbon tax is the mechanism that allows you to make an international agreement globally effective in a short period of time,” he said.

  “You could start with the E.U., United States and China—that would be enough,” he added, saying other nations confronted with a carbon-tax on their exports would quickly follow suit.

  To create strong “green” incentives, the levy should be given directly back to the public on a per capita basis—in the United States, he said, it would amount to several thousand dollars per household.

  “A person with several large cars and a large house will have a tax greatly exceeding the dividend. A family reducing its carbon footprint to less than average will make money,” Hansen wrote in December in an open letter to then president-elect Obama and his wife Michelle.

  A third pillar of his climate proposal centers on coal, the most plentiful and polluting of the major fossil fuels. Hansen says all new coal-fired power plants should be banned, and older ones fitted with systems to capture carbon emissions and bury them underground.

  Hansen’s proposals got an unsolicited boost at the climate conference Tuesday from leading U.S. economist William Nordhaus of Yale University, who told 2,000 experts that cap and trade “is inefficient and prone to market failure.”

  “It is better to change now, and quickly replace the cap and trade structure by a tax on green gas emissions.”

  After his 1980s testimony put him in the global spotlight, Hansen withdrew from the public arena to concentrate on science.

  But 15 years later, the yawning gap between scientific certainty and public doubt on the climate threat, combined with the Bush administration’s censuring of his institute’s statements on climate, prompted him to get back in the game.

“I decided that I didn’t want my grand-children to say, ‘grandpa understood what was happening but he didn’t make it clear’,” he said smiling.

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