Al Gore may be the #1 movie star of the neo-green, anti-global warming set, but Hansen's the guy with the scientific chops — so when he talks, Congress listens. Sort of. More like they listen in the 'let's call a hearing, we're somewhat concerned' way, rather than the 'holy shit we'd better do something' way.

Now Hansen's got another shot at a hearing, and he wants the heads of big oil companies behind bars for what he sees as their purposeful attempts to trick the world into thinking that global warming is no big deal:

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.

He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

Anyone who's willing to speak truth to power is OK in my book, but one hopes Dr. Hansen isn't committing political suicide here. Going before Congress with plans to strip out lobbyists' influence and jail the leaders of some of the most profitable companies in America? Noble, but not likely. And maybe you don't want to mention the part about trying to have members of Congress unseated? Telling people 'listen to me or I'm going to have you fired' isn't really a good idea unless you're their boss.

Source: The Guardian, via SciGuy

Here are some of the story ideas I'd love to see science-fiction stories dealing with:

Alternative fuels. I joked about "Chevron Extra Unleaded is people," in that poll about social problems a couple of weeks ago. But I could easily imagine equally crazy attempts to replace oil, no matter what the cost. Maybe we could genetically engineer creatures whose bodies secrete oils that we can burn. At the very least, you can expect to see more dependence on nuclear power, meaning more Three Mile Islands and terrorist targets. Or maybe you could write a utopian novel, about a society that manages to harness the solar winds for clean, sustainable energy.

Globalization without travel. We could see an era, within our lifetimes, when it's easy to communicate all over the world thanks to the Internet. But it's harder and harder to travel anywhere. So culture may be global, with Ukranians and Nigerians posting their lives on Youtube and Myspace. But goods and services may be increasingly local. You won't be able to get imported Japanese food any more, but you'll be able to watch Japanese television. Local cultures might even make a comeback, if it gets harder for multinationals like Starbucks and McDonald's to transport their crap around the world. Would we get more fascinated with other cultures? Or just turn insular?

It's a test. Maybe every planet that sustains intelligent life also has a layer of hydrocarbons sufficient to allow its inhabitants to expand off-world and start harvesting the resources of the solar system. And it's an intelligence test that most species fail: Will you figure out this one-time chance to create a solar-system-wide civilization, or will you use the resources to build shopping malls and fight bigger and better wars? Maybe there's a select club of alien races who were smart enough to make the correct use of their planets' hydrocarbon layers, and they're waiting to see if we qualify.

Aliens engineered the fossil fuels. And maybe deposits of fossil fuels in easily accessible locations don't come standard with habitable worlds. Maybe they're actually a very nice gift that somebody left for us. What if an alien race went around seeding planets with fossil layers that would help any intelligent races to jump-start their space exploration? And then the aliens come back once they spot the first signs of industrialization on our planet? It might take them a couple hundred light years to see our factories and engines and then make the trip here. Would they be pissed to see what we did with their gift?

Waiting to invade. And maybe aliens are just waiting until we use up our easiest power source, so they can come in and take what remains. Without fossil fuels, our global civilization will quickly disintegrate, and our science may regress considerably. It'll be much harder to share technological advances. Scientists could still collaborate online, but might not be able to travel, and might have a harder time getting access to resources. So we could find ourselves in the position of having drawn lots of attention to ourselves, with radio waves, probes and satellites — and then leaving ourselves defenseless. In a couple hundred years, we could be a very tempting target for aliens who managed to get out of their own solar system and notice that we're no longer as advanced as we used to be.