Amy Goodman recently interviewed climatologist James Hanson, who argued that the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen was good for the planet, because cap-and-trade-with-offsets are disastrous, in that they fail to reduce the use of fossil fuels. He proposes that we need to put a price on fossil fuel emissions and redistribute that to the population as a mechanism for discouraging the use of fossil fuels. Hanson characterized the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels, including the regrettable use of tar sands of Canada, as a moral issue because lives are at stake, as are entire low-lying countries:

Amy Goodman: So, how did you go from being the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies to getting arrested for these protests?

JAMES HANSEN: Well, these protests are what we call civil resistance, in the same way that Gandhi did. We’re trying to draw attention to the injustice, because this is really analogous. This is a moral issue, analogous to that faced by Lincoln with slavery or by Churchill with Nazism, because what we have here is a tremendous case of intergenerational injustice, because we are causing the problem, but our children and grandchildren are going to suffer the consequences. And our parents didn’t know that they were causing a problem for future generations, but we do. The science has become very clear. And we’re going to have to move to a clean energy future. And we could do that. And there would be many other advantages of doing it. Why don’t we do it? Because of the special interests and because of the role of money in Washington.

What is the problem with “cap and trade”?

[T]hey attempt to put a cap on different sources of carbon dioxide emissions. They say there’s a limit on how much a given industry in a country can emit. But the problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace.

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