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"We have not hit the disastrous level," says leading climate scientist James Hansen. "But we are close."
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| "The energy system and the tax system have got to be simplified in a way
that everybody understands and doesn’t allow the wealthy few to
completely rig the system," says Hansen.
Benedict Evans/Redux |
In the late 1980s, James Hansen became the first scientist to offer
unassailable evidence that burning fossil fuels is heating up the
planet. In the decades since, as the world has warmed, the ice has
melted and the wildfires have spread, he has published papers on
everything from the risks of rapid sea-level rise to the role of soot in
global temperature changes – all of it highlighting, methodically and
verifiably, that our fossil-fuel-powered civilization is a suicide
machine. And unlike some scientists, Hansen was never content to hide in
his office at NASA, where he was head of the Goddard Institute for
Space Studies in New York for nearly 35 years. He has testified before
Congress, marched in rallies and participated in protests against the
Keystone XL Pipeline and Big Coal (he went so far as to call coal trains
"death trains"). When I ran into him at an anti-coal rally in
Washington, D.C., in 2009, he was wearing a trench coat and a floppy
boater hat. I asked him, "Are you ready to get arrested?" He looked a
bit uneasy, but then smiled and said, "If that's what it takes."
The enormity of Hansen's insights, and the need to take immediate
action, have never been clearer. In November, temperatures in the
Arctic, where ice coverage is already at historic lows, hit 36 degrees
above average – a spike that freaked out even the most jaded climate
scientists. At the same time, alarming new evidence suggests the giant
ice sheets of West Antarctica are growing increasingly unstable,
elevating the risk of rapid sea-level rise that could have catastrophic
consequences for cities around the world. Not to mention that in
September, average measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a
record 400 parts per million. And of course, at precisely this crucial
moment – a moment when the leaders of the world's biggest economies had
just signed a new treaty to cut carbon pollution in the coming decades –
the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet elected a
president who thinks climate change is a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.
Hansen,
75, retired from NASA in 2013, but he remains as active and outspoken
as ever. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, he argues,
sweeping changes in energy and politics are needed, including
investments in new nuclear technology, a carbon tax on fossil fuels, and
perhaps a new political party that is free of corporate interests.
He
is also deeply involved in a lawsuit against the federal government,
brought by 21 kids under the age of 21 (including Hansen's
granddaughter), which argues that politicians knowingly allowed big
polluters to wreck the Earth's atmosphere and imperil the future
well-being of young people in America. A few weeks ago, a federal
district judge in Oregon delivered an opinion that found a stable
climate is indeed a fundamental right, clearing the way for the case to
go to trial in 2017. Hansen, who believes that the American political
system is too corrupt to deal with climate change through traditional
legislation, was hopeful. "It could be as important for climate as the
Civil Rights Act was for discrimination," he told me.
Last fall, I
visited Hansen at his old stone farmhouse in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania. It sits on 10 acres, with a tennis court and a row of
carefully trimmed apple trees lining the walk to the front door. We
talked in his office, a big room connected to a stone barn outfitted
with solar panels. He had the cool, cerebral manner of a man whose mind
is always processing complex algorithms. But at times he seemed
downright cranky, as if he were losing patience with the world's
collective failure to deal with the looming catastrophe that he has
articulated for the past 30 years. "It's getting really more and more
urgent," Hansen told me. "Our Founding Fathers believed you need a
revolution every now and then to shake things up – we have certainly
reached that time."
You've arguably done more than anyone to
raise awareness of the risks of climate change – what does Trump's
election say about the progress of the climate fight?
Well, this
is not a whole lot different than it was during the second Bush
administration, where we had basically two oil men running the country.
And President Bush largely delegated the energy and climate issue to
Vice President Cheney, who was particularly in favor of expanding by
hundreds the number of coal-fired power plants. Over the course of that
administration, the reaction to their proposals was so strong, and from
so many different angles – even the vice president's own energy and
climate task force – that the direction did not go as badly as it could
have.
In fact, if you make a graph of emissions, including a graph
of how the GDP has changed, there's really not much difference between
Democratic and Republican administrations. The curve has stayed the
same, and now under Obama it has started down modestly. In fact, if we
can put pressure on this government via the courts and otherwise, it's
plausible that Trump would be receptive to a rising carbon fee or carbon
tax. In some ways it's more plausible under a conservative government
[when Republicans might be less intent on obstructing legislation] than
under a liberal government.
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| Hansen devoted his career at NASA to researching climate change. Mary Altaffer/AP |
Trump's Cabinet nominees are virtually all climate deniers,
including the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott
Pruitt. Are Trump's appointments a sign that climate denialism has gone
mainstream?
Climate denialism never died. My climate program at
NASA was zeroed out in 1981 when the administration appointed a hatchet
man to manage the program at Department of Energy. Denialism was still
very strong in 2005-2006 when the White House ordered NASA to curtail my
speaking. When I objected to this censorship, using the first line of
the NASA Mission Statement ["to understand and protect our home
planet"], the NASA administrator, who was an adamant climate denier,
eliminated that line from the NASA Mission Statement. Denialism is no
more mainstream today than it was in those years.
How much damage can a guy like Pruitt do to our chances of solving the climate crisis?
The
EPA is not the issue. They have been attacked several times by an
incoming administration since I got into this business – but they always
survive without much damage. EPA cannot solve the climate problem,
which is a political issue.
If President-elect Trump called you and asked for advice on climate policy, what would you tell him?
What
we need is a policy that honestly addresses the fundamentals. We must
make the price of fossil fuels honest by including a carbon fee – that
is, a straightforward tax on fossil fuels when they come out of the
ground, and which is returned directly to people as a kind of yearly
dividend or payment. Perhaps someone will explain to President-elect
Trump that a carbon fee brings back jobs to the U.S. much more
effectively than jawboning manufacturers – it will also drive the U.S.
to become a leader in clean-energy technology, which also helps our
exports. The rest of the world believes in climate change, even if the
Trump administration doesn't.
You know, he said exactly what was
necessary to get the support of the people that he needed to win the
election. But that doesn't mean he necessarily will adopt the implied
policies. So he wants to save the jobs of coal miners and fossil-fuel
workers and make the U.S. energy-independent, but he also wants to
invest in infrastructure, which will make the U.S. economically strong
in the long run, and you can easily prove that investing in coal and
tar-sands pipelines is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I would also
tell him to think of what the energy sources of the future are going to
be and to consider nuclear power. China and India, most of their energy
is coming from coal-burning. And you're not going to replace that with
solar panels. As you can see from the panels on my barn, I'm all for
solar power. Here on the farm, we generate more energy than we use.
Because we have a lot of solar panels. It cost me $75,000. That's good,
but it's not enough. The world needs energy. We've got to develop a new
generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fueled molten salt
reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot
have a meltdown. These types of reactors also reduce nuclear waste to a
very small fraction of what it is now. If we don't think about nuclear
power, then we will leave a more dangerous world for young people.
If the Trump administration pushes fossil fuels for the next four years, what are the climate implications?
Well,
it has enormous implications, especially if it results in the building
of infrastructure like the Keystone Pipeline, which then opens up more
unconventional fossil fuels, which are particularly heavy in their
carbon footprint because of the energy that it takes to get them out of
the ground and process them. But I don't think that could happen
quickly, and there's going to be tremendous resistance by
environmentalists, both on the ground and through the courts. Also, the
fossil-fuel industry has made a huge investment in fracking over the
past 20 years or so, and they now have created enough of a bubble in gas
that it really makes no economic sense to reopen coal-fired power
plants when gas is so much cheaper. So I don't think Trump can easily
reverse the trend away from coal on the time scale of four years.
How would you judge President Obama's legacy on climate change?
I
would give him a D. You know, he's saying the right words, but he had a
golden opportunity. When he had control of both houses of Congress and a
70 percent approval rating, he could have done something strong on
climate in the first term – but he would have had to be a different
personality than he is. He would have to have taken the FDR approach of
explaining things to the American public with his "fireside chats," and
he would have had to work with Congress, which he didn't do.
You
know, the liberal approach of subsidizing solar panels and windmills
gets you a few percent of the energy, but it doesn't phase you off
fossil fuels, and it never will. No matter how much you subsidize them,
intermittent renewables are not sufficient to replace fossil fuels. So
he did a few things that were useful, but it's not the fundamental
approach that's needed.
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| President Obama delivers remarks on energy after a tour of a Boulder City, Nevada, solar panel field in March 2012. Lawrence Jackson/The White House |
Climate change hardly came up during the election, except when Al
Gore campaigned with Hillary Clinton. Do you think Gore has been an
effective climate advocate?
I'm sorely distressed by his most
recent TED talk [which was optimistic in outlook], where Gore made it
sound like we solved the climate problem. Bullshit. We are at the point
now where if you want to stabilize the Earth's energy balance, which is
nominally what you would need to do to stabilize climate, you would need
to reduce emissions several percent a year, and you would need to suck
170 gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is more than you could
get from reforestation and improved agricultural practices. So either
you have to suck CO2 out of the air with some method that is more
effective than the quasi-natural improved forestry and agricultural
practices, or you leave the planet out of balance, which increases the
threat that some things will go unstable, like ice sheets.
You've described the impacts of climate change as "young people's burden." What do you mean by that?
Well,
we know from the Earth's history that the climate system's response to
today's CO2 levels will include changes that are really unacceptable.
Several meters of sea-level rise would mean most coastal cities –
including Miami and Norfolk and Boston – would be dysfunctional, even if
parts of them were still sticking out of the water. It's just an issue
of how long that would take.
Right now, the Earth's temperature is
already well into the range that existed during the Eemian period,
120,000 years ago, which was the last time the Earth was warmer than it
is now. And that was a time when sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than
it is now. So that's what we could expect if we just leave things the
way they are. And we've got more warming in the pipeline, so we're going
to the top of and even outside of the Eemian range if we don't do
something. And that something is that we have to move to clean energy as
quickly as possible. If we burn all the fossil fuels, then we will melt
all the ice on the planet eventually, and that would raise the seas by
about 250 feet. So we can't do that. But if we just stay on this path,
then it's the CO2 that we're putting up there that is a burden for young
people because they're going to have to figure out how to get it out of
the atmosphere. Or figure out how to live on a radically different
planet.
Trump has talked about pulling out of the Paris Agreement. How do you feel about what was achieved in Paris?
You
know, the fundamental idea that we have a climate problem and we're
gonna need to limit global warming to avoid dangerous changes was agreed
in 1992 [at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].
This new agreement doesn't really change anything. It just reaffirms
that. That's not to say there's nothing useful accomplished in Paris.
The most useful thing is probably the encouragement of investment into
carbon-free energies. But it's not really there yet. I mean, the U.S.
should double or triple its investment in energy. The investment in
research and development on clean energies is actually very small. There
are these big, undefined subsidies, like renewable portfolio standards,
that states place on their electricity generation, which can help them
get 20 or 30 percent of their power from renewables. But we're not
actually making the investments in advanced energy systems, which we
should be doing. There were agreements to do that in Paris. They have to
be implemented – somebody's gotta actually provide the money.
I
think that our government has become sufficiently cumbersome in its
support of R&D that I'd place more hope in the private sector. But
in order to spur the private sector, you've got to provide the
incentive. And that's why I'm a big supporter of a carbon fee.
Is the target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, which is the centerpiece of the Paris Agreement, still achievable?
It's
possible, but barely. If global emissions rates fell at a rate of even
two or three percent a year, you could achieve the two-degree target.
People say we're already past that, because they're just assuming we
won't be able to reduce missions that quickly. What I argue, however, is
that two degrees is dangerous. Two degrees is a little warmer than the
period when sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher. So it's not a good
target. It never had a good scientific basis.
In Paris, negotiators settled in an "aspirational" target of 1.5C.
Yes.
But that would require a six-percent-a-year reduction in emissions,
which may be implausible without a large amount of negative emissions –
that is, developing some technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Let's
talk more about policy. You're a big believer in a revenue-neutral
carbon fee. Explain how that would work, and why you're such a big
supporter of it.
It's very simple. You collect it at the small
number of sources, the domestic mines and the ports of entry, from
fossil-fuel companies. And you can distribute it back to people. The
simplest way to distribute it and encourage the actions that are needed
to move us to clean energy is to just give an equal amount to all legal
residents. So the person who does better than average in limiting his
carbon footprint will make money. And it doesn't really require you to
calculate carbon footprint – for instance, the price of food will change
as sources that use more fossil fuel, like food imported from New
Zealand, become more expensive. And so you are encouraged to buy
something from the nearby farm.
So this would provide the
incentive for entrepreneurs and businesses to develop carbon-free
products and carbon-free energies. And those countries that are early
adopters would benefit because they would tend to develop the products
that the rest of the world would need also, so it makes sense to do it.
But it's just not the way our politics tend to work; they tend to favor
special interests. And even the environmentalists will decide what they
want to favor and say, "Oh, we should subsidize this." I don't think we
should subsidize anything. We should let the market decide.
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| Hansen being arrested at a White House protest in 2011. "We have to move to clean energy," he says. "If we burn all the fossil fuels, then we will melt all the ice on the planet, and that would raise the seas by about 250 feet." Ben Powless |
Of course, the problem with getting carbon-fee legislation passed
is that Congress is run by people who don't even acknowledge that
climate change is a problem.
Yeah, although behind the scenes a
lot of them do. And many of them would support a revenue-neutral carbon
fee. And, you know, I am equally critical of the liberals and the
conservatives, because the liberals are using climate policy as a basis
for getting some support from people who are concerned about the
environment and recognize the reality of the climate threat. But they're
not addressing the fundamental problem. The public understands that,
and that leads to all the other things that people are concerned about,
like the fact that you're answering to lobbyists while you're in
Congress, then you become a lobbyist when you retire. [Former House
Democratic Majority Leader] Dick Gephardt retired after he couldn't get
the nomination for president, and in the first year out of office he got
$120,000 per quarter from Peabody Coal, almost half a million dollars a
year from a single source. It's like when Hillary Clinton is asked,
"Why did you take $250,000 from the banks to give a talk?" and she said,
"Well, that's what they offered." That's the way it works.
We
need a revolutionary third party that takes no money from lobbyists.
Look at Obama and Bernie Sanders: Their campaigns initially were funded
by small donors. They didn't have to take lobbyist money. The public is
not into the details of what's going on, but it knows that it's become a
rotten system.
I agree that a carbon fee could be an effective
tool to cut emissions, but how do you get the politics right to get it
done? I mean, it's one thing to...
Well, you have to make it
simple. You can't do this 3,000-page crap, like they did with
cap-and-trade in 2009. You gotta simplify it down to the absolute
basics, and you do it in a way that the public will not let you change
it. If the public is getting this dividend, they won't let you change
it.
That's the same argument people use for a flat tax, which
will never happen because all the loopholes in the tax system are
deliberate. And political.
That's why we need a new party, which
is gonna be based on these principles. These are the most fundamental
things. The energy system and the tax system have got to be simplified
in a way that everybody understands and doesn't allow the wealthy few to
completely rig the system.
Sounds like you think we need a Boston Carbon Party.
[
Laughs] Something like that.
A
lot of people say you are a great scientist, but when it comes to
policy, that's a whole other thing – and something you should leave to
politicians.
Bullshit. What scientists do is analyze problems,
including energy aspects of the problem. I got started thinking about
energy way back in 1981, when I published a paper that concluded that
you can't burn all the coal, otherwise you end up with a different
planet. There's nothing wrong with scientists thinking about energy
policy, in my opinion. In fact, if you have some scientific insights
into the implications of different policies, you should say them. It's
the politicians who try to stop you. And that includes people who ran
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where I worked for 33 years. Before I
would go to Washington to testify, I'd sometimes get a call from the
director of the center – somebody who I respect a lot and is a very good
scientist and engineer. But he would tell me, "Just be sure to only
talk about science, not policy."
Well, I don't agree with that.
Here's another example – at NASA headquarters, we would have a trial run
on press conferences. And at one of them, which was about declining sea
ice in the Arctic, one of the trial questions was, "What can we do
about it?" The scientist who responded said, "Well, we can reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases." And some of the more political types in
the agency said, "No, you can't say that. That's policy!" [
Laughs]
When
I was working at NASA, I always felt I was working for the taxpayer. I
was not working for the administration. When a new administration comes
in, they think they can control public-information offices and science
agencies and influence what they're saying so they become, in effect,
offices of propaganda. But that's just wrong. When we have knowledge
about something, we should not be prohibited from saying it as clearly
as we can.
You were among the first to alert the world to the
dangers of climate change back in the 1980s. Since that time, carbon
pollution has just gone up. What does that tell you about humanity?
Well,
that's always been the way we do things. In the U.S., we didn't face up
to the dangers of World War II until we were forced to. And then we did
a lot. But in this case, it's particularly difficult and crucial
because of the inertia of the climate system and the fact that the
climate system gains momentum, and you've gotta stop that. It is a very
powerful system. We're close to that point of no return. Whether we've
passed it or not, I don't know.... We've passed it in the sense that
some climate impacts are going to occur and some sea-level rise is going
to occur, but we have not necessarily hit the disastrous level, which
would knock down global economies and leave us with an ungovernable
planet. But we are close. So this is why it's really crucial what
happens in the near term. But it will take a strong leader who is
willing to take on special interests. Whether that can be done without a
new party that's founded on just that principle, I'm not sure. So we'll
have to see.
Do you ever feel a sense of futility about the
situation we're in – the essential insanity of continuing to emit carbon
pollution, given what we know about the future consequences?
It's
not at all surprising, because it's related to the desire of people to
raise their standard of living out of poverty levels. That's what we did
in the West. We discovered fossil fuels, which allowed us to replace
slavery with fossil fuels. That's what China and India and other
countries want to do now. But if they do it the way we did, then we're
all going down together. If we go over there and say, "You guys do it
differently. Use solar panels" [
laughs], that's stupid. We have to work together in a way that will actually work. And they understand the risks, too.
There
is a lot of talk about the rise of China as a military power. Well,
they're not gonna bomb their customers. The bigger threat is this
climate threat. That's what could destroy civilization as we know it.
Only
one major political party in the world denies climate change, and it's
in charge of the most important political body in the world. Watch here.
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