In October 2007, James E. Hansen testified with regard to an application to build a new coal-burning plant in Iowa. Hanson is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and senior scientist in the Columbia University Earth Institute. He said some harsh things about our substantial dependence on coal [1]:
Global warming from continued burning of more and more fossil fuels poses clear dangers for the planet and for the planet’s present and future inhabitants. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO2 in the air. Saving the planet and creation surely requires phase-out of coal use except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered (stored in one of several possible ways).
Hundreds of millions of people live less than 20 feet above sea level. Thus the number of people affected would be 1000 times greater than in the New Orleans Katrina disaster. Although Iowa would not be directly affected by sea level rise, repercussions would be worldwide. Ice sheet tipping points and disintegration necessarily unfold more slowly than tipping points for sea ice, on time scales of decades to centuries, because of the greater inertia of thick ice sheets. But that inertia is not our friend, as it also makes ice sheet disintegration more difficult to halt once it gets rolling. Moreover, unlike sea ice cover, ice sheet disintegration is practically irreversible . . .
The biologist E.O. Wilson (2006) explains that the 21st century is a “bottleneck” for species, because of extreme stresses they will experience, most of all because of climate change. He foresees a brighter future beyond the fossil fuel era, beyond the human population peak that will occur if developing countries follow the path of developed countries and China to lower fertility rates. Air and water can be clean and we can learn to live with other species of creation in a sustainable way, using renewable energy. . .
Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact. Increased fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, compared to the pre-industrial atmosphere, is due 50% to coal, 35% to oil and 15% to gas. As oil resources peak, coal will determine future CO2 levels. Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.
[Emphasis added]. Hansen’s comments led to these comments by David Roberts of Grist: [2]
What’s notable about global warming is that you get the industrial efficiency and the horrific result without the intent. You have, in effect, a holocaust with no evil. Coal miners are trying to feed their families. Utilities are trying to keep the lights on. Industries are trying to profit. Governments are trying to gain power and provide for citizens. All us developed world drivers are trying to get to and from work. Nobody intends to create a horror, but cumulatively, that’s exactly what we are doing . . .
The biggest threats to humanity today, and for the foreseeable future, are cumulative and incremental, without deliberate agency but with the potential to generate unthinkable misery. With 9 billion people soon to swarm the globe, we are all “good Germans,” standing by while horror unfolds, and we are all Jews, suffering the horror itself. We are all perpetrators, all victims.
Which led to this comment, also at Grist:
When you look at the maps of how much land would be flooded on a mere 3-meter sea level rise it is clear that billions of people would be displaced. If you consider that droughts and flooding are already damaging farmland around the world it’s possible that billions could find themselves without adequate food or drinking water.
Consider a thousand Bangledesh’s. The assistance we are currently giving those people is a joke. I saw six people with one, gallon-bottle of water between them on the BBC. We hand out water but not water purification kits.
And this comment at Grist:
The banality of our everyday behavior, including a good dose of corporate/national greed, in conjunction with the standard operations of the particular civilization we live in, is leading to catastrophe. Just as evolution has no intent, but “expresses” the operation of a biological system, so the complex system known as our civilization is to “blame” — and it’s very difficult to spread blame to most people in developed countries. There’s no scary monster or national leader to focus on.
And consider this comment at The Daily Dish, [3] Andrew Sullivan’s site:
[Coal] is tremendously dirty stuff, full of sulfur, nitrogen, radioactive and so on compounds. The reason people shouldn’t eat fish because of Hg, which is a global epidemic of “too high to eat”, is almost solely due to coal burning, it comes FROM the coal. Hg is a incredible neuro-toxin during embryonic stages for almost all life. We’re watching these Hg level reach levels where they are fundamentally changing the ability of young to grow.
For more on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, see this DI post. [4]
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