A very interesting Article I was made aware of. Interesting to Note the USA may not want Canada’s Tar Sand Oil. So why the hell does Canada keep pushing to pull it out when we all know it is leading to “Game Over”? 

 J

The New York
Times

Op-Ed
Contributor

Game Over for the
Climate

By JAMES
HANSEN

Published: May 9, 2012

GLOBAL warming
isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a
recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil
in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada
proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar
sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of
carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to
fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil,
gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more
than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it
is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration
of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and
destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to
50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization
would be at risk.

That is the
long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next
several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North
Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does
come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be
incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s
Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds
apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically.
President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access
to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but
also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels
in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather,
as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot
summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the
recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which
killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by
human-induced climate change. 

We have known
since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right
amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are
doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the
result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part
of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But
they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel
emissions.

The concentration
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393
p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240
gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly
in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If
we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our
addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations
below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our
children a climate system that is out of their control. 

We need to start
reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We
should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel
companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a
per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This
market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth,
avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans,
except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in
increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the
carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the
proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to
economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price. 

But instead of
placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true
costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing
the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per
year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through
mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar
shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama
speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to
change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which
yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological
leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy
course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge,
but leadership is essential.

The science of the
situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that
can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every
major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is
real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting
goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst
and be judged immoral by coming generations.