by James Hansen, The Nation, April 21, 2007

There’s a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known about global warming by those who need to know: the public and policy-makers….

If we do follow (our current path), even for another 10 years, it guarantees that we will have dramatic climate changes that produce what I would call a different planet – one without sea ice in the Arctic; with worldwide, repeated coastal tragedies associated with storms and a continuously rising sea level; and with regional disruptions due to freshwater shortages and shifting climatic zones.

I’ve arrived at five recommendations for what should be done to address the problem. If Congress were to follow these recommendations, we could solve the problem. Interestingly, this is not a gloom-and-doom story. In fact, the things we need to do have many other benefits in terms of our economy, our national security, our energy independence and preserving the environment – preserving creation.

First, there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2. That technology is probably five or 10 years away. It will become clear over the next 10 years that coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2 are going to have to be bulldozed. That’s the only way we can keep CO2 from getting well into the dangerous level, because our consumption of oil and gas alone will take us close to the dangerous level. And oil and gas are such convenient fuels (and located in countries where we can’t tell people not to mine them) that they surely will be used. So why build old-technology power plants if you’re not going to be able to operate them over their lifetime, which is 50 or 75 years? It doesn’t make sense. Besides, there’s so much potential in efficiency, we don’t need new power plants if we take advantage of that.

Second, and this is the hard recommendation that no politician seems willing to stand up and say is necessary: The only way we are going to prevent having an amount of CO2 that is far beyond the dangerous level is by putting a price on emissions

…But a price on carbon emissions is not enough, which brings us to the third recommendation: We need energy-efficiency standards. That’s been proven time and again. The biggest use of energy is in buildings, and the engineers and architects have said that they can readily reduce the energy requirement of new buildings by 50 percent.

…The fourth recommendation – and this is probably the easiest one – involves the question of ice-sheet stability…Congress should ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a study on this and report its conclusions in very plain language. The National Academy of Sciences was established by Abraham Lincoln for just this sort of purpose, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t use it that way.

The fifth recommendation concerns how we have gotten into this situation in which there is a gap between what the relevant scientific community understands and what the public and policy-makers know.

A fundamental premise of democracy is that the public is informed and that they’re honestly informed…I don’t know anything in our Constitution that says that the executive branch should filter scientific information going to Congressional committees.

The global warming problem has brought into focus an overall problem: the pervasive influence of special interests on the functioning of our government and on communications with the public.

It seems to me that it will be difficult to solve the global warming problem until we have effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests no longer have such a big influence on policy makers.

Excerpted; Full article at www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/hansen.