Cap and trade legislation, aimed at reducing global warming, has not progressed very far in recent years. But James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, remains optimistic that Americans will find a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And in a recent interview with Eliot Spitzer on Current TV, he offered an innovative approach to the problem.
“We should be collecting a fee from fossil fuel companies that gradually rises over time, and 100 percent of that money should be distributed to the public, not one dime to the government,” Hansen told Current TV. “If we did that, the people who do better than average in limiting their fossil fuel use will actually get more in this dividend than they would pay in increased energy prices.”
Is this a strategy for fighting global warming that conservatives could embrace? Spitzer thinks so. Of course, they would first need to agree that global warming is occurring. But, as Spitzer points out, a recent op-ed in the New York Times may offer some hope on that front. Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had expressed concerns about global warming science in the past, has come to a new conclusion, based on careful analysis of temperature data.
“Call me a converted skeptic,” Muller wrote. “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
Muller’s research is online here.
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