Interviews with Truthout.org: on Energy & Oil

We can't wait 4 more years to address climate change

A: This is another reason why we're running the campaign now--because if you follow the science, we don't have four years to wait. We really have to start tackling this now. It's really important for the climate and it's time that people put their politics where their values and science argue they ought to be. I think Obama supporters are really having a rude awakening right now. The US, as you know, is the largest per capita contributor to climate change and the direction the US pushes goes a long way toward determining what the rest of the world does, and from that perspective, dramatically downscaling carbon emissions goes a long way toward determining the global carbon budget and helps move global policy that way.

National ban on fracking; natural gas is not clean

A: The current science confirms the cynics here. When you do full life-cycle accounting of it, it is not a cleaner fuel, and is very carbon intensive. Add into that all the impacts on water and we do not want to be going there.

Q: Would you support a national ban on fracking?

A: Absolutely. We should not be opening up new lines of carbon right now, like shale gas and shale oil, as well as tar sands oil, and we just cannot go there right now if we do not want to go over the climate cliff. We're looking at 5-6 degrees Celsius increases of warming by the end of century and that's just not survivable. People need to hear the truth about that. Already, the US has been pulled back in their climate understanding by intense propaganda campaign, but even so, they're seeing it right now, with the droughts and the floods and the hurricanes and all that.

No evidence that carbon sequestration solves climate crisis

A: Our job is to do the right thing in both the climate emergency and not let the public relations campaigns of the various fossil fuel interests confuse our thinking--because they're hyped up. Take, for example, carbon sequestration: there's really no evidence for it whatsoever that it's going to do the job, and it just so happens that it puts billions of dollars into the pockets of coal companies. This is just an exercise in influence peddling.

Q: They're not based on science, is what you're saying?

A: Exactly. They're not based on science or even sound economics, because the economics behind the carbon trade and carbon markets looks to be as problematic as hedge funds.

Q: So, what is the alternative?

A: It's not carbon and not nuclear. It needs to be clean. A lot of it has to do with redirecting our economy to less carbon intensive, relocalized versions of the economy.

Completely zero out climate emissions, as fast as possible

A: I transitioned into doing climate work because from my knowledge of science and how you read the data, I certainly share the perspective that we can't take a single day for granted--that we have to work as fast as humanly possible to completely zero out climate emissions, but we have to do more than that as well. Restoring ecosystem resilience is part of the Green New Deal, which we don't often talk about because we're usually focused on the headlines: energy, transportation and food. Those are the big three for climate emissions, and they're critical for economic security, so that's kind of where the focus is.