James Hansen: "The green new deal as they've defined that is nonsense. We need a real deal which understands how economics works and what we need to do in order to move off of fossil fuels. And that requires in addition to this rising carbon fee, with the distribution to the public. We also have to have the technologies we have to help the developing countries, the Western world burned the carbon budget for the whole world. Now we've got a problem. And we're going to have to help those countries they want to raise their standards of living to match ours. And so there, it's a big problem but it's a solvable problem."
Host to Sunrise Movement's co-founder Varshini Prakash: "You and James Hansen both agree on the scale of the challenge but he thinks your solution is nonsense."
Varshini Prakash: "Well I would say that I don't think that simply putting a price on carbon is going to be enough in this moment I think if it were 30 years ago that might have been enough and and even after the most recent IPCC report the UN Climate report that came out last fall's said that we need to make unprecedented changes to every part of our economy and our society to stop this crisis. So I don't think that that's going to be enough I think we need to be we need..."
Hansen: "Yeah, it's not enough, but it's the underlying policy that's required to make the price of fossil fuels honest, otherwise people will keep burning them the same way that we did in the West, because people want energy, they're going to raise their standard of living. They need energy, and we need to make the price of fossil fuels include their cost to society that's the underlying requirement. But there is technology development also, I just quickly touch on, because, because James talked about matching."
