James Hansen Quotes

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

Cap and trade is not an easy one for refiners, so we tried to get some moderation in the bill, and we did, but not near as much I would like.

'Cap and trade' generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non-productive millionaires, all at public expense. The public is fed up with such business. Tax with 100% dividend, in contrast, would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security.

Cap and trade is a sledge hammer to freedom.

Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket… Because I’m capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations. That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers.

Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.

As soon as cap and trade was presented as a bipartisan compromise, many conservatives who originally supported the idea, turned against it ... Thus have fossil fuel companies and their ideological allies paralyzed the policymaking process both at the global level and in the United States.

A cap and trade system would put some kind of price on the carbon footprint.

The trading mechanism proposed in Clean Energy Jobs is based upon sound free-market principles. It will allow emitters to find the most cost-effective ways to meet emissions reduction goals.

I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism.

The UK is one of the only nations on earth that has actually met and even exceeded its goals under the Kyoto Protocol.

The US needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. The revenues from these auctions can be used to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the stagnation.

There's such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it's difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That's not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we'll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool.

There is much to be said for an emissions trading scheme. It was, after all, the mechanism for emission reduction ultimately chosen by the Howard government.

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very good.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

Most businesses do not take governments seriously when it comes to climate, primarily because many governments have inconsistent and incoherent policies and then often keep changing them, sometimes retroactively. This makes businesses reluctant to invest in greener technologies.

History will judge harshly my Republican colleagues who deny the science of climate change. Similarly, those Democrats who would use climate change as a basis to regulate out of existence the American experience will face the harsh reality that their ideas will fail.

I hope the EPA will listen to the many votes over the years in Congress opposing cap-and-trade and rescind that proposed rule.

To achieve policy stability and certainty, we need to establish a meaningful price on carbon and cut the billions of dollars spent each year on fossil-fuel subsidies, along with well-structured financial tools and rules.

The Conservatives will have a serious plan that is not a tax on families and businesses, that will get our emissions down by partnering, by being strategic and and taking it seriously, but not through just a tax mechanism.

Cap and trade is an important tool in California's climate policy portfolio. It sends a price signal to industries to reduce their carbon pollution while generating billions of dollars in revenue for investments in clean transportation and direct pollution reduction.

If someone wants to do a carbon fee and someone else wants to do a cap on emissions or a renewable portfolio standard, we don't start labeling each other as more or less progressive.

There are some really wealthy hedge fund billionaires in San Francisco who have pledged a lot of money for Democratic candidates to argue for cap and trade and carbon tax and all these things.

Nothing could be more regressive than carbon taxes.