NASA expert says climate change Copenhagen conference is flawed

A scientist who is highly praised in the field of climate change and who originally helped alert the world to the dangers of global warming was quoted on Thursday that the climate change Copenhagen conference next week was based on such flawed proposals and ideas that he hoped they failed.

James Hansen, the current director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said forging a global agreement to cut emissions once the Kyoto treaty expires were based on a “fundamentally wrong” approach.

“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper ahead of the December 7-18 summit.

Hansen is the most sceptical about the preferred measure of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a cap-and-trade system under which a progressively stricter ‘right to pollute’ would be exchanged in a carbon market.

He concluded that a direct tax on fossil fuels was the only realistic way to achieve the necessary cuts.

“The approach that’s been talked about is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation, Hansen told the paper. “I think it’s just as well that we not have a substantive treaty, because if it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing, and people agree to that, then they’ll spend years trying to determine exactly what that means and what is a commitment, what are the mechanisms. The whole idea that you have goals which you’re supposed to meet and that you have outs, with offsets (sold through the carbon market), means you know it’s an attempt to continue business as usual.”

Hansen, who was a headline name across the worldwide press in 1988 with his US Congress testimony that climate change was already well under way.

“We’ve got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what they can get through offsets,” Hansen said.
However, he insisted there was still hope, telling the Guardian: “I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it’s too late.”In that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet? You want to minimise the damage.”