NASA Scientist James Hansen Lectures at UM

Climate Expert Condemns Coal, Protest Pans Montana’s Energy Plans

By Emily Darrell, 10-23-07

	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

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.

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