HANSEN: Canada's 'Neanderthal' on tarsands!

[Oscar]

NASA's James Hansen, Leaving Post to Fight Climate Change Full Time

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/02

Published on Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by Common Dreams

'As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government.'- Jon Queally, staff writer

James Hansen, the NASA scientist credited with raising the earliest and most consistent alarm over the dangers of human-caused global warming and climate change has announced that he's leaving his government job so that he can put his full energies into the climate movement he helped spur.

He is leaving NASA so that he can spend more time waging the political and legal battles he thinks are necessary to save the planet's climate for future generations. (Image via Wikipedia) After almost half a century working for the government, he told the New York Times on Tuesday he now considered it appropriate to step outside so he could more fully join the political and legal fight to limit greenhouse gases and runaway climate change.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he told the Times in an interview.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/02

[Oscar]

‘Neanderthal’ … James Hansen responds to Joe Oliver

< http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/04/26/nean ... oe-oliver/ >

by macleans.ca on Friday, April 26, 2013 10:24pm

As Washington correspondent Luiza Ch. Savage has reported, Natural Resources Joe Oliver had some choice words for James Hansen this week.

During his appearance in Washington, Oliver was asked about the recently retired NASA scientist, a key and noted opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Here’s Oliver:

“There is no tar in the oil sands, that’s why we refer to it as oil sands. Secondly, with respect to James Hansen, recently with NASA, I mean, he was the one who said, I think four years ago, that if we go ahead with the development of the oil sands it’s “game over for the climate.” Well, this is exaggerated rhetoric. It’s frankly nonsense. I don’t know why he said it, but he should be ashamed of having said it. It’s one-one thousandth of global emissions. Coal fired electricity in the U.S. is well over 30 times that. I wonder why the focus on an area when there are 999 more important areas to focus on. Quite frankly, I think that kind of exaggerated rhetoric, that kind of hyperbole, doesn’t do the cause any good at all. People are sensible. Americans and Canadians are logical people. When they are presented with predictions four years ago that in four years we are doomed – and we’re not — it frankly undercuts an issue that is very important.”
On the House this weekend on CBC, Hansen is asked about Oliver’s comments:

< http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2 ... liver.html >

“Well, the current government is a Neanderthal on this issue,” he tells host Evan Solomon. ”Many of the governments are denying and trying to ignore what’s going to happen a few decades downstream. They’re only worried about the next two or three years.”