Last week (February 25, 2009), Dr. James Hansen, the most influential scientist in the alarmist camp, testified before the House Ways & Means Committee on “Scientific Objectives for Climate Change Legislation.” In oral remarks, Hansen, who spoke as a faculty member of Columbia University’s Earth Institute rather than as an employee of NASA, said the scientific objective of climate policy should be to lower atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from 385 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm or less. This, as he surely knows, is an impossible goal barring radical breakthroughs not just in energy production but also in air capture of CO2.
Even if by 2050, the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and former Soviet Union achieve zero net emissions and developing countries reduce their carbon intensity to 62% below 2005 levels, this would only be enough to…
Continue Reading“The economic recession/depression is good, not bad. It lowers our carbon footprint in countless ways. It saves resources. It throttles back industrial society to sustainable levels that were exceeded long ago. Let the downturn continue to get us out of the growth mentality. Let rising expectations fall! Less is more!”
When will some prominent Left environmentalist slip and say something like this? No doubt the tongues are tied right now, but as time goes on it will be harder to keep the Malthusians muted.
Consider Paul Ehrlich’s advice for families, which can be extended to the economy as a whole:
… Continue ReadingOnce a cooperative movement had gained momentum, it could also engage in an enormous campaign to re-educate other consumers and to change their buying habits. The pitch might be: ‘Try to live below your means!
Solar hyberbole is decades old. Inevitably, every few months there are fresh headlines about significant cost reductions, insinuating that the competitive moment of solar panels is arriving. In a recent post at Climate Progress, for example, Joe Romm reports: “Solar prices set to fall by up to 40 per cent by year end.” Google “solar” and “advances” to see what you get for previous years and even decades!
But fossil-fuel technologies have advanced too, and the competitive gap between solar and hydrocarbons for generating electricity remains huge. DOE Secretary Stephen Chu told the New York Times recently that solar technology will have to get five times better than it is today to be part of the energy transformation that he and other alarmists think is necessary.
Why is “free” energy from the sun so expensive?…
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