Scientist hopes warming summit will fail

NEW YORK, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- A top U.S. climate change scientist denounced next week's U.N. summit on global warming in Denmark as a farce and said he planned to boycott it.

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James Hansen told The Times of London the 192-nation conference in Copenhagen would be a travesty because it supports a "cap and trade" system.

"They are selling indulgences there," Hansen said. "The developed nations want to continue basically business as usual, so they are expected to purchase indulgences to give some small amount of money to developing countries."

Cap and trade sets a government limit, or cap, on overall pollutant emissions linked to global warming. It then allows emitters to "trade" pollution permits among themselves. In effect, a buyer would pay to pollute, while a seller would be rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed.

"The fundamental problem is that fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy," Hansen, 68, told the newspaper. "As long as they are, they are going to be used. It's remarkable. They refuse to recognize and address the fundamental problem and the obvious solution."

He said it would be better for the summit to fail than to reach the cap and trade system envisioned.

Hansen, an adjunct professor at New York's Columbia University, said the only effective way of controlling global warming would be to institute an increasing "carbon tax," not cap and trade.

"We are going to have to move beyond fossil fuels at some point. Why continue to stretch it out longer?" he said.

"The only way we can do that is by putting a price on carbon emissions," he said. "The business community and the public need to understand that there will be a gradually increasing price on carbon emissions."