Mark Goldes

What Does Obama's Cabinet Have in Store for Alternative Energy?

U.S. Must Take the Lead to Avoid Eco-Disaster

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of NASA scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the U.S. now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988. Hansen's institute monitors data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of scientists who said studies indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.

Guardian UK 1-19-09