The Daily Triangle

By Harold

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in our day-to-day lives, Laura and I went to hear James Hansen’s lecture on global climate change Monday night.

Hansen is like the first version of Al Gore — he gave Congressional testimony in the 1980s and created one of the first models of climate change almost 30 years ago. However, he is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, not a politician, so he didn’t have the communication tools or the marketing genius to make an award-winning documentary.

But Hansen had a receptive audience Monday night — he filled up the lower level of Memorial Hall, the biggest lecture space on campus. He spent a lot of time using models to prove that the climate is changing, but the most interesting part came at the end, when he discussed what should be done.

On a international level, he said “cap and trade” won’t work and instead we need “fee and dividend,” which is used successfully in British Columbia. Basically money is collected from fossil fuel companies and paid directly to taxpayers. The price of goods will be higher, but the amount collected will be paid back to consumers (in his example, each adult receives $3,000). Click here for a full explanation.

After all the pictures of melting ice, it was good to hear about a solution. But I have no idea how a radical idea like this would get through our current political system, and short of writing our congressman there wasn’t much I could do at the moment. Then, in response to a question, Hansen agreed that the best thing an individual could do was to stop eating meat, or at least cut down (Hansen said he is “95 percent vegetarian”).  This article explains the link between meat production and greenhouse gases, as revealed in a report by the UN.

So now I’m faced with a difficult decision — do I stop eating meat today to save the environment after I’m dead? And doesn’t that defeat the purpose of moving back to the South? Eating BBQ has been one of the best things about my day, and now I have to feel guilty about that. Thanks, James.