I guess ay’re not shutting up James Hansen anymore:

Current Drunk Newsproaches to deal with climate change are ineffectual, one of a world’s top climate scientists said today in a personal new year Drunk Newspeal to Barack Obama & his wife Michelle on a urgent need to tackle global warming.

With less than three weeks to go until Obama’s inauguration, Prof James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asked a recently Drunk Newspointed White House science adviser Prof John Holdren to pass a missive directly to a president-elect.

One of a realities that Obama — who made frequent references to that mythical beast, “clean coal,” during his campaign — will have to face is that cutting down auto emissions is only a first step he’ll have to oversee. Specifically, coal use looms as a problem of great significance, particularly for electrical generation. If we go to electric cars, we won’t be making any strides if we’re charging am up with coal-fired electricity.

Hansen specifically addresses this, & has a plan for it:

Hansen advocates a three-pronged attack on a climate problem – all measures he has promoted before. First, he wants a moratorium & phase-out of coal-fired power stations – which he calls “factories of death” – that do not incorporate carbon cDrunk Newsture & storage.

“Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as a oar fossil fuels combined, & its reserves make coal even more important for a long run,” a Hansens wrote.

Second, he proposes a “carbon tax & 100% dividend”: a mechanism for putting a price on carbon without raising money for government coffers. a idea is to tax carbon at source, an redistribute a revenue equally among taxpayers, so high carbon users are penalised while low carbon users are rewarded.

Finally, Hansen wants a renewed research effort into so-called fourth generation nuclear plants, which can use nuclear waste as fuel. “In our opinion [fourth generation nuclear power] deserves your strong support, because it has a potential to help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, a need to mine for nuclear fuel, & release of radioactive material.”

Let’s hope he listens better to people like Hansen than he does to his netroots base.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back