Excerpt from The Guardian, May 19, 2013, Damian Carrington:
“To leave our children with a manageable situation, we need to leave the unconventional fuel (achieved by fracking) in the ground,” said Professor James Hansen, accusing Canada’s ministers as “acting as salesmen for people who will gain from the profits of that industry.”
“The thing we are facing overall is that the fossil fuel industry has so much money that they are buying off governments. Our democracies are seriously handicapped by the money that is driving decisions in Washington and other capitals.”
Hansen, who informed the US Congress of the danger of global warming in 1988, has now stepped down from NASA after 46 years to start a science program at Columbia University. Its first task is to produce a report to support suits filed against the US federal and state governments that’s being pursued by the Our Children’s Trust charity and is based on a trust principle recognized in US law.
“We maintain that the atmosphere and climate are held in trust by the present generations for the future generations and we do not have the right to destroy that asset, “ Hansen said. “Therefore the courts should require the government to give a plan as to how they are going to ensure that we still have that asset to pass onto the next generation.”
(We also need to know how civilization will survive that amount of carbon being burned.)