In his final testimony submitted to the Iowa Utilities Board on the proposed coal-fired power plant in Iowa, NASA’s James Hansen used a very provocative metaphor about the trains that deliver coal:

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains — no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

The President and CEO of the National Mining Association wrote Hansen a letter (posted here by Hansen with his response) complaining:

The suggestion that coal utilization for electricity generation can be equated with the systematic extermination of European Jewry is both repellent and preposterous…. I believe you owe the hard-working men and women of the coal mining and railroad industries an apology and respectfully request that you refrain from making such comments in the future.

Hansen’s reply was:

There is nothing scientifically invalid about the above paragraph. If this paragraph makes you uncomfortable, well, perhaps it should.

I have a slightly different view of the metaphor.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, many of my colleagues in climate-action circles are delighted at the detailed commitments the presidential candidates in the Democrat field are making about what they’ll do to fight global warming. It seems ungrateful to ask them for more. But ask we must.

We need to know what they’ll do to act quickly. And we need to hear their unifying vision for the post-carbon world.

On speed: We’ve all read Jim Hansen’s warning that the international community must take significant action within a decade if we wish to avoid the most dangerous consequences of global warming.

Now the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has moved up the deadline. In announcing the IPCC’s final report on Nov. 16, Rajendra Pachuari warned, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

So, the question we must ask the candidates is not only what they’ll do, but when they’ll do it. What, for example, is each candidate’s plan for the first 180 days of the presidency — the six-month honeymoon period between inauguration and the middle of August, when Congress traditionally takes its summer recess?

What will the next President do about our constipated Congress?

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A new study, “Climate Alarm: Disasters increase as climate change bites,” by Oxfam International finds:

Climatic disasters are on the increase as the Earth warms up — in line with scientific observations and computer simulations that model future climate. 2007 has been a year of climatic crises, especially floods, often of an unprecedented nature. They included Africa’s worst floods in three decades, unprecedented flooding in Mexico, massive floods in South Asia and heat waves and forest fires in Europe, Australia, and California. By mid November the United Nations had launched 15 ‘flash appeals’, the greatest ever number in one year. All but one were in response to climatic disasters.

This is no shock to Climate Progress readers, but we all need to remember that this is a human tragedy (and it is going to get much, much worse if we don’t reverse emissions trends within the decade), as the Oxfam study reports in its summary:

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The op-ed in the November 19th LA Times (We Need Voltswagens in the print edition; Bring back the electric car online) deserves attention from the public and state policy makers. Sherry Boschert, author of Plug-in Hybrids, is publicly posing the stark question as it needs to be asked: Will the California Air Resources Board (CARB) push for cars capable of zero-emission driving for today’s consumers using available, affordable, tested battery technology or will they support mere research programs even proponents say won’t be marketable for a generation.

On the ground at the LA Auto Show–and on the air (Honda here and BMW here)–automakers tout hydrogen & fuel cell vehicles disingenuously as “ready for the world when the world is ready.” Behind the scenes they lobby to lower the numbers of these million-dollar babies they must produce to meet their zero emission vehicle obligations. As Martin Zimmerman of the LA Times recently wrote in an otherwise gushing review of the Toyota FCHV recently, “Maybe, as some critics like to say, hydrogen is the fuel of the future and always will be.”

It’s past time the public, environmental organizations and policy makers got hip to the automaker con game and all got on the same page advocating plug-in cars. I look forward to CARB’s response.

More posts by Marc G. can be found at Plugs and Cars.

Related Climate Progress posts:

• Dream of hydrogen car goes down in flames
• Climate Progress Dehypes Hydrogen Again
• The Car of the Future: Plug-in Hybrids
• The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate