Anyone catch the Business & Media Institute’s piece on James Hansen’s call for phasing out the use of coal for energy? (You can read Hansen’s paper here.) Hansen writes:

A practical global strategy almost surely requires a rising global price on CO2 emissions and phase-out of coal use except for cases where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. The carbon price should eliminate use of unconventional fossil fuels, unless, as is unlikely, the CO2 can be captured.

So, basically, according to Hansen, we mothball coal-fired plants. No more coal, despite the fact that coal supplies half of our energy needs, and keeps our energy bills lower than they would be without coal — and despite the fact that new coal plants get friendlier and friendlier to the environment, as industry finds cleaner and cleaner ways to produce energy.

According to my Planet Gore colleague Sterling Burnett of the NCPA:

[R]ecent research has estimated the economic benefit of coal-based energy and found that the annual benefit of coal use currently adds $1 trillion to U.S. GDP, providing more than $360 billion in household income and accounting for nearly seven million jobs. . . . How has the nation’s air quality improved despite the increasing use of coal to generate electricity? The short answer is older coal-fired power plants emitted 90 percent more pollution than new state-of-the-art plants.

This will not convince Hansen:

Humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate. If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels to feed a growing appetite for energy-intensive life styles, we will soon leave the climate of the Holocene, the world of human history. The eventual response to doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 likely would be a nearly ice-free planet.

What a great example of climate alarmism. Putting aside the issue of how sound his predictions are . . . Does Hansen believe that, between now and the time his predictions become reality, we will just sit around doing nothing? That industries will, all of the sudden, stop finding cleaner and more efficient ways to produce? That business and investors and entrepreneurs will stop pouring money into new technologies, such as capturing and storing carbon? That today — when temperatures and CO2 levels are actually lower than at other times in earth’s history — is really the point of no return, our final chance to save the planet? I am not sure if we even have a real dialogue on climate issues, but, if so, hype and exaggeration do not move it forward.