NASA Warming Scientist Hansen Blasts Obama's 'Counterfeit' Climate Bill - Calls it 'a monstrous absurdity...less than worthless!'

Written by Marc Morano, Climate Depot | 09 July 2009

Below is an excerpt of NASA scientist James Hansen's critique of the President Obama supported Waxman-Markey global warming cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and is now under consideration in the U.S. Senate. Hansen's full critique appeared on July 9, 2009 in The Huffington Post. Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but he writes on this policy-related topic as a private citizen.

Jim Hansen Excerpt:

It didn't take long for the counterfeit climate bill known as Waxman-Markey to push back against President Obama's agenda. As the president was arriving in Italy for his first Group of Eight summit, the New York Times was reporting that efforts to close ranks on global warming between the G-8 and the emerging economies had already tanked. [...]

This requires nothing less than an energy revolution based on efficiency and carbon-free energy sources. Alas, we won't get there with the Waxman-Markey bill, a monstrous absurdity hatched in Washington after energetic insemination by special interests.

For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. [...]

The fact is that the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. Their bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It's less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation.

Here are a few of the bill's egregious flaws:

•It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.

•It sets meager targets -- 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year's level -- and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests - while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.

•Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."