Nothing much more to say today about our pandemic, I last week already reported on the slate of victories by Democrats, and the Ukraine War just drags on, so let me start by showing a graph from the New York Times this morning about murder rates in the USA.
Seems that our national murder rate dropped from two decades ago, then picked up during the Trump administration, and is now declining again because of Joe Biden. Well, the more cited reasons are a variety of repercussions from our pandemic. There was also an uptick in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020. Not shown above is the simple fact that between the 1990's and 2014, crime in the U.S. fell by more than 50%!!! The latest Gallup poll on crime showed one graph and a variety of tables.
I have known James Hansen for a couple of decades, but just in passing after a couple of interactions at conferences and in his Goddard office. I remain on his vast mailing list. Today he commented on a Boston Globe article he published entitled, The Eyes of Climate Change History are on Biden. You can click on that link, but won't be able to read it if you are not a subscriber. So I'll summarize.
The below quotes come from James E. Hansen, director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
- He indicated that when he was a graduate student in the mid-60s, he communicated with Carl Sagan about life on Venus, when science was still hopeful that it could be a shelter for future humans. We now know that the surface is at 872 F and the pressure is very high, the equivalent of being 3000 feet underwater.
What happened? The Venus Syndrome, or a runaway greenhouse effect.- To quote: Planet Earth is fortunate. Nuclear fusion in our sun’s core only slowly burns hotter. It will be billions of years before the sun blows away our atmosphere and burns Earth to a crisp. Before then, humanity must find a new home. But we had better worry about the near-term first.
Further: By the 1970s I became more interested in the implications of rapid changes humans are making to Earth’s atmosphere. Congress wondered about the climate effects of President Jimmy Carter’s program to subsidize coal gasification and rock-fracturing (fracking) to extract shale oil and tight gas. I turned to full-time research on the climate effects on Earth of growing atmospheric carbon dioxide — a biproduct of the energy obtained when we burn coal, oil, and gas.
This was a period I was working in Congress and helped draft the original legislation on ocean thermal hydrogen conversion and hydrogen. I also was instrumental in passing a key fracking bill. There was no popular concern then about global warming. Hansen was ahead of his time. I wasn't.- Then, and this is of course Hansen's view: In 1988 and 1989 I testified to Congress that human-made global warming had begun and by the early 21st century people would feel increasing climate extremes: more extreme heat waves, droughts, and fires, but also more extreme rain and floods.
Moving on: The Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted by almost all nations after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference, professes agreement to avoid dangerous human-made climate change. Yet ensuing actions consist simply of pledges...- And on: ...in 2004, as global emissions continued to rise, I publicly endorsed John Kerry for president over incumbent George W. Bush. After the election, the Bush administration tried to prevent my public speaking. The censorship hullabaloo increased my determination to understand the broad problem of climate, energy, and economics.
So: A turning point was possible in the 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama spoke in his campaign of “a planet in peril.” I wrote a letter to Obama describing the actions needed to address climate. The essential requirement is a rising carbon fee or tax, done in a way that the public does not suffer. I called it “carbon tax and 100 percent dividend” in 2008, but within months changed it to carbon “fee and dividend” to emphasize that a fee was collected from fossil fuel companies and the funds were distributed uniformly to all legal residents. Most people would gain financially. Wealthy people, who have a large carbon footprint, would lose, but they can afford it.
- That year, my focus was more on world peace, so I wrote an open letter to Obama in the Huffington Post. In 2009 I followed up with something similar to Hansen's, but instead of calling it a carbon tax, I thought in another HuffPo that a carbon dioxide credit program was more acceptable. Never listened to me, but nevertheless won a Nobel Prize.
- Hansen indicated that Obama also did not listen to him. Welcome to my club.
- Hansen also wrote to Obama about ultra-safe nuclear power. But in 2011 a tsunami caused that nuclear cataclysm at Fukushima. We now have learned another lesson. The largest nuclear power plant in Europe happens to be in southern Ukraine, which is now a hotspot for another possible world catastrophe. Hansen, however, remains bullish, with: Fortunately, China has been far-sighted and has accelerated plans for nuclear power.
- I think Hansen has pro-China proclivities, for also: The eyes of history, however, will focus on how Biden affects the course of our world. When he called Taiwan before calling President Xi Jinping of China, it seemed that Biden had gone daft. The Chinese people are not our enemy. They will not storm up our beaches with guns blazing. But the waves of the Atlantic and Pacific will storm up our beaches in our young people’s lifetimes if we do not work with China to stabilize climate. True enough, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, China suspended climate change cooperation with the USA.
- And: Several colleagues and I have petitioned EPA to use its existing authority to declare CO2 from fossil fuels a substance that presents an “unreasonable risk of injury to health and the environment.” EPA is required by law to respond to our petition by Sept. 14, and it would be helpful if citizens would register their support by submitting a public comment here.
- Hansen closes with: The other crucial action for Biden is to reform the NRC. Prior Democratic administrations used the NRC to cripple and attempt to kill nuclear power, under the pretense of making our safest energy source even safer. In reality, their objective was to make nuclear power construction so slow and expensive that it would die. President Biden, the eyes of history are upon you.
So probably the Carl Sagan of climate change, James Hansen, continues to press for progress in climate change remediation.
- I totally support him here.
- I was not fully aware that he also loves fission nuclear power, but the safe kind, which will take eons to perfect.
I very well know Kirk Sorensen, a foremost advocate for safe fission. Here is his TEDx talk on Thorium as a substitute for Uranium and Plutonium. However, the last time I saw him was for dinner in Honolulu a decade ago.- In the meantime I favor fusion nuclear power, realizing that commercialization is more than a generation away, certainly after 2050.
I'll close today with a wise Snoopy.
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