James Hansen should be what Al Gore is

I saw James Hansen's piece today in the huffington post and confirmed again my desire to pass over the cultural battle on climate change to his capable hands. Hansen is a climate scientist, but also an outspoken critic on current climate policies and heads NASA's Goddard research center. He was censored by the white house during the Bush years, and understands the corruption of the political system. Most importantly, he is not a polarizing figure in the way that Al Gore is. Half (or rather a little less than half) of Americans voted against Gore in 2000, and still don't particularly like to hear him talk. Try typing Al Gore Global warming into youtube and check out the results - it seems like a fair number of conservatives actually think that Gore invented global warming for profit and political gain. Who we need in the forefront of this is a quality scientist like Hansen.  

Here is a good clip from his editorial where he rips into the controversial Waxmen/Markley bill then proposes an alternative. Coincidentally, this is the alternative option I support as well:

For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. Here are a few of the bill's egregious flaws:

• It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
• It sets meager targets -- 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year's level -- and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests - while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
• Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."
• It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, "businesses and households won't be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense," thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.

There is an alternative, of course, and that is a carbon fee, applied at the source (mine or port of entry) that rises continually. I prefer the "fee-and-dividend" version of this approach in which all revenues are returned to the public on an equal, per capita basis, so those with below-average carbon footprints come out ahead.

A carbon fee-and-dividend would be an economic stimulus and boon for the public. By the time the fee reached the equivalent of $1/gallon of gasoline ($115/ton of CO2) the rebate in the United States would be $2000-3000 per adult or $6000-9000 for a family with two children.