NASA Scientist James Hansen Lectures at UM
Climate Expert Condemns Coal, Protest Pans Montana’s Energy Plans
By Emily Darrell, 10-23-07
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| Caption: Demonstrators gather at the University of Montana's oval Monday night to protest proposed construction of 11 new coal plants in the state. The rally took place before NASA's top climate change scientist, James Hansen, took the stage at the University Center to give a lecture on "The Threat to the Planet: How Can We Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?” As the New York Times highlighted in a story over the weekend, opposition is building across the West to coal plants. The story focused partly on the partnerships forming against the most visible project in the state: The coal-fired power plant near Highwood. Photo by Emily Darrell | |
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Montana – a state often thought of as somewhat remote by much of the country – may soon find itself playing a central character in a drama of not just national, but global, proportions. The drama? Much Ado About Climate Change.
On the University of Montana campus Monday night, two separate but related events highlighted Montana’s vast coal reserves and the importance of what the state government ultimately decides to do with these reserves.
The evening’s first event, a rally at the University’s Oval, was staged to protest Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s support – and to a lesser degree the support of Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester – for so-called “clean coal.” (To use quote marks or not to use quote marks around clean coal is almost politically charged in and of itself.) The search for oil alternatives has caused every state to seek out its own energy destiny, and while Iowa looked into a crystal ball and saw ethanol, Schweitzer and other Montanans see the bituminous berry as the best solution to the state’s, and nation’s, energy woes. Montana has more coal reserves than any state in the nation, and about eight percent of the world supply. Schweitzer recently proposed the opening of several plants across the state that would convert coal to fuel.
The anti-coal rally was attended by about 70-100 people, many holding protest signs, and featured speakers from Missoula-based environmental groups such as GlobalWarmingSolution.org, members of national groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, and local politicians. Their main objection to clean coal? It doesn’t exist, they say.
“There is no such thing as clean coal,” said regional director of the Sierra Club Paul Shively, before he urged audience members to call their congressmen demanding a moratorium on coal.
State Rep. Betsy Hands (D-Missoula) spoke about a recent bill – a bill that would reduce Montana’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – that was voted down in the House along partisan lines (51-49).
The basic premise behind making coal clean, or carbon neutral, is that if coal is converted to synthetic fuel by a certain process known as the Fischer-Tropsch process its polluting impurities are removed. The CO2 that is emitted during processing is caught in a process called carbon sequestration and stored, thus never reaching the atmosphere and not contributing to global warming.
Many of the critics of clean coal say that carbon sequestration technology has not been perfected and that some CO2 will still reach the atmosphere during processing. Many critics also see coal extraction as inherently destructive to the natural environment.
The topic of coal-as-fuel featured prominently in the lecture by top NASA climate scientist James Hansen, which was held following the rally in the packed University Center ballroom.
Hansen believes that banning all coal-fired power plants by 2012, or allowing only plants that can successfully sequester 100 percent of their CO2 emissions, is 80 percent of the fight against dangerous levels of global warming.
Hansen, now in his fortieth year with NASA, first warned the United States Congress in the late 1980’s that humans were dangerously changing the earth’s climate and said he had the research to prove it.
Hansen got a good deal of press for this, most notably from The New York Times, and a lot of flak, and even threats, from his own employers. He’s seen his climate reports censored by the White House, and for years the general public, and even many scientists, have disbelieved, ignored, or simply forgotten about Hansen’s climate predictions. That is until they started coming true.
Hansens’ lecture – “The Threat to the Planet: How Can We Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?” – explained the science behind global warming and detailed the direct steps that our government must take to ensure our environment doesn’t reach what Hansen calls “tipping points” – i.e. irreversible damage such as melted polar ice caps and extinct species.
Much of Hansen’s research focuses on making climatic models of the earth based on data taken from Antarctica ice sheets. Bubbles of air within these ice sheets, Hansen said, can provide over 400,000 years of climatic data. To the climate-change denialists who argue that the earth’s climate has always gone through changes, Hansen would agree they’re right. The earth’s climate has always seen changes; the only problem is in the last few decades these changes have been happening 10,000 times as fast as they did in the previous 400,000 years.
Hansen described global warming as a pipeline: Although the Earth hasn’t seen many catastrophic consequences from climate change yet, even if all burning of fossil fuels were stopped today, the global warming stored up “in the pipeline” would have negative effects on the planet for decades to come.
Along with banning coal-fired power plants, Hansen has a few major pieces of advice for our government, and governments the world over, to avoid reaching the tipping points he spoke of. One is taxing pollution so that corporations are financially motivated to create and use cleaner fuels. “We have to have a price on carbon emissions to stimulate new technologies. We need to replace fossil fuels,” Hansen said.
Hansen also believes we need to slow down our use of oil and gas reserves so that we can use them for as long as possible. “Oil and gas are enough to take us up to the dangerous level [of global warming]” Hansen said, “but we can’t really prevent that . . .We need to slow down the emissions from oil and gas and use the existing supplies frugally.”
Hansen said that if places like Montana look toward alternative energy sources to coal it could create many jobs “not inferior to coal mining.”
“They’d be good jobs,” Hansen said.
Another thing American people need to do? Stop blaming China or waiting for them to up their environmental standards before we up ours. Although China is currently polluting on a scale roughly equivalent to that of the U.S., the vast majority of environmental damage that has been done has been done by developed nations, Hansen said.
Hansen also believes that American people can’t fall for vague promises or half-baked plans put forth by their politicians. We need to put serious pressure on our government to come up with concrete plans to reduce carbon emissions, Hansen said. We need plans like an outright moratorium on coal-fired power plants.
If the people pressure the government, Hansen said, the government will pressure the corporation to start cleaning up their act.
“We have to have people starting to stand up,” Hansen said. “Democracy will work but we have to use it.
Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously reported a specific number of coal-to-liquid plants proposed by Gov. Brian Schweitzer across the state. Evan Barrett, the Chief Business Development Officer in the Governor’s office of Economic Development said the Governor is proposing several plants, but there are no specific plans on the number of projects yet.
All I can say is, shut down coal production and drilling for petroleum and You'd sure better hope we have global warming this winter. the signs are not pointing that way though.
Comment By Hal Herring, 10-23-07Hooray for this story. Hansen's been a voice in the wilderness for decades, now finally finding an audience as his research becomes manifest in the changes in our climate. I am particularly interested in his last statements about jobs - there is an entirely new economy out there slowly being born, one that has been stifled for years by big conventional energy interests and their wealth-stupified errand boys in government. The future does not have to be hot, smoggy, and full of loss and death.
Years ago, when I reported on mercury contamination issues, I talked with some of the entreprenuers and engineers who had patented the "scrubbers" that were supposed to be mandatory on new cola plants or on expansions of existing plants that woudl result in greater emmission of pollutants. Alot of these entreprenuers were people of average means who had invested their money and their lives in developing this technology. thye figured that they'd hit the jackpot, since the Clean Air Act, etc, would require the use of thier products. But alas, a new President simply stepped in and told his friends in the power industry (Enron, anybody?) that they wouldn't have to use the technology, that, in fact they could allow the air and waters of the US to absorb the costs of dealing with their effluent. Result? A stagnation of technological fixes for pollution, millions of pounds of new pollutants in the air, waters, and lungs of the citizenry, mercury in the fish, and empty pockets for the American entreprenuers who produced the scrubber technology. The entreprenuers were not part of the old order of coal/oil/etc, so they got cut out of the profits, and we all suffered.
It is not good business to keep doing the same destructive things
over and over at the expense of moving forward with new ideas, simply because the old ways make money for the select few who hold the power.
We can become world leaders in new energy technology, and unfold a new economic boom that will be positive for the environment as well as profits. Now imagine that.
now, what are we going to do for drinking water?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?em&ex=1193112000&en=409568d61448aa92&ei=5087
UK court says Gore is a fraud. August 2007 Update: Man-made Catastrophic Global Warming Not True. Further, flawed NASA Global Warming data paid for by George Soros. In order to be an intelligent reader you must have a basic knowledge. Please do your own homework; a starting point http://www.InteliOrg.com/
Comment By malencid, 10-23-07Dr. Coles is once again using hyperbole; no make that untruths. Go to realclimate.org or http://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2007/index.php#presenters
if you are interested in hearing what is being said by scientists in the climate change community.
I concur with Dr. James Hansen that human activity such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels contributes to global climate change. Many scientists also believe that if there is in fact “Much Ado About Climate Change,” carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies have a critical role to play.
CCS technologies offer the potential for continued use of abundant, low-cost fossil fuels while making significant climate change progress by preventing release of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Geologic Storage considers CCS a “least cost” option to mitigate climate change impacts within a portfolio of technology solutions.
While CCS technologies have not yet been deployed at the scale required to mitigate climate change, the technologies have been commercially available for decades. Research and field validation tests are underway worldwide to increase scale, lower costs and demonstrate the efficacy of geologic carbon storage.
A serious climate mitigation strategy will require re-working the entire global energy system, which has huge implications for the global economy. Montana State University (MSU) is playing a leading role in tackling climate change through its management of the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s seven partnerships involved in demonstrating geologic carbon storage. CCS technologies must be viewed as part of the solution to climate change and has an important role to play both globally as well as in Montana’s energy and economic future.
Pamela Tomski, Director
Education and Outreach
Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership
About the global warming "pipiline" Hansen describes - the industrial and natural systems involved with AGW (anthropogenic global warming) are huge - energy consumption, the world ocean, icecaps, forests, the atmosphere. These systems change slowly; even if we reduced GHG emissions now, the climate will continue to worsen for many years. If we wait for the effects of AGW to become severe before we take preventive action, we will have waited too long, like a person who waits for heart disease before starting a healthful diet.
A pollution tax is the most economical and effective way to spur energy efficiency and clean energy development. Let's put our scientists, engineers, and business people to work preventing AGW.
Just what kind of pollution tax are you proposing? Is it going to affect you? I find most enviro ideas do NOT affect them, jsut other people. How about an increased tax on houses over 1000sf? Tax on jet fuel for private planes? Or did you have in mind taxing ranchers, and those that work for a living? Coal fired plants producing electricy?
Comment By Warren, 10-26-07Marion,
The tax would be on gasoline, coal, aviation fuel, natural gas, etc. with the amount of tax paid per unit of fuel proportional to the amount of CO2 equivalent emitted per unit of fuel. For example, electrical energy from a high carbon emitting source such as an inefficient coal fired plant would have a relatively high tax, say 4 cents per kilowatt hour, while electricity from a low carbon emitting source, such as an efficient combined cycle natural gas plant would have a low tax, say 1 cent per kilowatt hour, and electricity from a non carbon emitting source such as wind generated electricity would have no tax. Similarly treat liquid fuels and other energy production and consumption.
All consumers would pay higher prices for energy and goods proportionate to the GHG (and possibly other pollutants) emissions resulting from their consumption. The tax proceeds could be rebated evenly to the overall public.
I also work for a living, I pay my way and my taxes now, and will continue to do so.
We must greatly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and soon, or we will leave a seriously degraded world to posterity. Let's get to work with a can-do will-do attitude. Our predecessors built security and a high standard of living for us; now it's our turn to do the right thing.
I'm not an engineer or a climatologist, just a longtime Northern California hobby gardener.
My friends and I have noticed that the honey bees are all gone and the good bug/bad bug cycles are all off kilter The flowers bloom out of season and there are sudden extremes of hot and cold. The rain often does not hit the ground here, skating over and dumping most of it in the mountains. We have hot dry wind then cold dry wind. Everything is mixed up and the results are not good. Climate change is here and it isn't good for plants, flowers and other living things.