The inconvenient truth is that James Hansen hardly has been right on anything,

I'll give him these two though:

...there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m.

...a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

And it could have been different, if only we had efficient energy alternatives.

But we don't.

Beside nuclear and hydropower, none of the socalled reneawbles deliver on their promises.

Even though wind and solar are free sources, as hydropower, the former don't deliver 24/7 which our energy delivery system have to.

What's missing is cheap energy storage technology.

There is none (economical). Except pumped storage electricity plants. But this is not a general solution because there is very few lands and regions in the world that have area and elevation available where this technology can be used. For these plants, You need two storage ponds, not one as in regular hydro power plants.

But we need alternative energy solutions in the future. Not because of CO2, but because fossil fuels will be exhausted at some time.

So, research has to continue, but what we should not commit to, is implementation of uncompetitive reneawbles.

If You try to replace affordable energy system with one much more expensive, people will experience significant loss in standards of living. Look to Europe what happens when expectations and reality don't meet.

Our politicians don't live in Your bubble, they live in the real world were all other people live, and I'd like to see the politician who would dare to decide to to stop using current fossilbased energy and replace it with solar and wind.

There are a couple of countries that have decided to embark on large scale reneawble installations, Germany and Japan. We can follow these experiments in real time.

My bet is they will discover the warning given that You can only go that far, going further will be counterproductive.

As last winter, Germany had to restart some of their idled nuclear power plants because they could not draw more on their neighbors, France and the Chech's.

Japan does not have that option - to exchange power with neighbors. It will be interesting to see what they choose.