With Governor Jerry Brown sitting in the audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, James Hansen, a NASA scientist and leading authority on climate change, called California’s newly-launched cap and trade program a “half-assed” way to deal with global warming.

Hansen was there Tuesday to accept the club’s annual Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communications, and what he was communicating that night wasn’t exactly a new message from him. In 2009, he likened “feckless” cap and trade to the “Temple of Doom” from the movie “Indiana Jones.”   

Hansen is the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Columbia University. He was one of the first, and most outspoken, activists to bring awareness of global warming to the public.

Cap and trade is a program that establishes a market for trading permits to produce polluting greenhouse gases that essentially allows an individual polluter to continue its activities unabated, albeit at a price. Hansen would prefer a straightforward carbon tax on polluters that would compel them to find ways to cut emissions. He doesn’t think cap and trade will do that and argued that its biggest supporters are fossil-fuel energy producers, polluters and financial institutions.     

Noting that bank trading desks play a big role in the market, he asked in his comments at the club, “Why do you want big banks in this problem? Why should they be making money? Every cent they make is coming out of the public's hide. And they add absolutely nothing. What you want is a system which is very simple and makes things cleaner.”

California’s cap and trade market, which is modeled after European and Australian efforts and got underway earlier this month, is expected to become the second-largest in the world. Congress tried, but failed, to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2010.

Hansen is used to being frustrated by “feckless” politicians and a misguided public. He has watched for years as public opinion polls about the existence of global warming, as well as the cause of it, sink before an onslaught of well-funded misinformation and ideological anti-government sentiment.

A Washington Post-Stanford University poll released in July showed the American public no longer considered global warming to be the country’s chief environmental problem. It had dropped from 33% in 2007 to 18%, replace by water and air pollution. A PEW Research Center poll in October showed that 67% of Americans believed that the Earth was warming, down from 77% in the middle of the last decade. Less than half of Republicans (48%) believed it.

“Oil companies are so relieved to realize that they do not need to learn to be energy companies that they are decreasing their already trivial investments in renewable energy,” Hansen wrote in an email three years ago to the secretary of the Australian Department of Climate Change.

“They are using the money to buy greenwash advertisements. Perhaps if politicians and businesses paint each other green, it will not seem so bad when our forests burn.”

–Ken Broder    

To Learn More:

James Hansen Blasts Cap and Trade (by David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle)

The Political History of Cap and Trade (by Richard Conniff, The Smithsonian)