The Climate Crisis

Coal Goal and Melt Felt: Hansen Speaks

Excerpts from an interview with James Hansen, the NASA scientist who is perhaps the preeminent expert on the Climate Crisis, in Grist:

Q.What needs to happen, in your opinion, in the next few years if we're going to prevent reaching that point of no return?

A. A moratorium on coal-fired power plants and phasing those out over the next few decades. I think that's perhaps the most important thing.... We had been going from coal to oil to [natural] gas, each one being less carbon-intensive. But now all of a sudden we're leaping back toward coal. That is the big concern, because that's where the huge potential CO2 amount is.

Then we also need to conserve the liquid and gas fuel so that we can develop the next phase of the industrial revolution because we're going to have to find energy sources that don't produce CO2. In order to give us time to do that, we need to use oil and gas, which are precious fuels, as if they were precious.

Another one is addressing this ice-sheet issue. For example, if the National Academy of Sciences would issue a report on this, that would help draw attention to the fact that we are so close to a major tipping point.

We're probably going to pass the dangerous level of atmospheric CO2, and we're going to have to figure out some ways to draw down atmospheric CO2. That tells us we should have greater emphasis on good agricultural and forestry practices and perhaps even burning biofuels in power plants that capture CO2.

Q. You have a new paper that will be coming out on the implications of peak oil in the climate debate. Can you tell us a little about the conclusions of that report?

A. The main point of that paper, which I think is fairly important, is that gas and oil already have enough CO2 in them to take us to approximately the dangerous level, and perhaps beyond the dangerous level. It's pretty clear we're going to use those fuels, and it's not practical to capture the CO2 in oil since it's used in mobile sources. Some of the CO2 from gas used in power plants, you could capture the CO2, but there are no plans to do that yet.

That means that the only way to keep CO2 from exceeding 450 parts per million would be to say we'll have no more emissions from coal, and that would mean that we should not be building any more coal-fired plants until we have the sequestration technology. A molecule of CO2 from coal, in a certain sense, is different from one from oil or gas, because in the case of oil and gas, it doesn't matter too much when you burn it, because a good fraction of it's going to stay there 500 years anyway. If we wait to use the coal until after we have the sequestration technology, then we could prevent that contribution. I don't think that has sunk in yet to policy makers, because there are many countries going right ahead and making plans to build more coal-fired power plants.

Q. Do you think the politicization of science is going to continue? Are you hopeful about political changes making a difference as far as climate policy?

A. Unfortunately, it's likely to continue because the scale of the economics of what's involved is so huge.

Obviously, there's a lot of change in the air. It seems like there will be some action in the next couple of years, but it's a question of what that action will be and whether it will be commensurate with the problem. The fact that now some of the industries that were denying that there was a problem are coming around and coming to the table is more a reflection of the fact that they want to help determine what is done. And if they succeed in making what is done negligibly small or much less than what is needed, then that will be very unfortunate. But it remains to be seen. It's going to be interesting in the next few years.