No more coal-fired power plants, says James Hansen
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Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today, again, from Margaret Swedish:
Just saw this and wanted to make note today. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and one of our country’s most important scientific voices on climate change, yesterday called for the end of coal-fired power plants. No more should be built, and those that exist should be “bulldozed” by mid-century, he said.
His call was cited in this Wash. Post article about the new agreement among states out West to cooperate in reducing carbon emissions. Already the State of California has said it will not buy electricity from coal-fired plants.
Some folks want slow incremental change, or modest change, like the AFL-CIO cited in the Post article. That won’t work if we want our descendants to have a habitable planet. Things are changing way too fast for those who want, as the article says, to “protect the economy.” The scientists closest to the science are getting more and more urgent by the day, and that should tell us something.
Saving the planet is going to cause some big economic disruptions, and we whould be preparing for that rather than being in denial about it. But those disruptions will be a picnic compared to the disruptions to come if don’t get busy with this business of the major energy transition required of this generation.
Hansen is one of this site’s favorite experts — someone not afraid to simply say what is necessary to save our planet from catastrophic warming, the kind we cannot survive.
There is nothing dirtier than coal, nothing that pollutes our atmosphere more in terms of greenhouse gases. Stopping emissions from coal-fired power plants is one of the highest priorites in the struggle to rebalance Earth’s climate — that, along with weaning ourselves from oil and gasoline.
This is strong stuff, necessary stuff. We concur. Bulldoze them.
Technorati Tags: coal power, climate change, greenhouse gasses, power plant, GISS, james hansen
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