Copenhagen: blowing smoke?
December 5th, 2009 by Jim JustAccording to James Hansen, the track being followed by international climate negotiators is the disaster track. He says it will be better for the planet and for future generations if next week’s Copenhagen climate change summit ends in collapse.
As he writes in an article in Newsweek:
I am sorry to say that most of what politicians are doing on the climate front is greenwashing—their proposals sound good, but they are deceiving you and themselves at the same time. Politicians think that if matters look difficult, compromise is a good approach. Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise—they are what they are.
Here’s the remedy to the climate crisis that is being rolled out at Copenhagen:
Hansen thinks the whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to start over from scratch. The climate problem is solvable, if we phase out global coal emissions within 20 years and prohibit emissions from unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale.
But not if we just keep blowing smoke.