We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Dr. James Hansen, regarded by many as one of the world’s climate gurus, called for a moratorium on building more coal-fired power plants in the United States. Shockingly, in the next decade alone 159 new coal plants are scheduled to be built, part of Vice President’s Cheney’s national energy plan.

Hansen, a professor at Columbia, heads the NASA Institute for Space Studies in Greenbelt, Maryland. So, yeah the guy is wicked smart. He was one of the first scientists to testify before the House of Representatives back in 1988, “that there was a strong “cause and effect relationship between observed temperatures and human emissions into the atmosphere.” Basically, he was one of the first to connect global warming and human activity. One of those activities is burning fossil fuels. One of those fossil fuels is coal. The question is, will we (meaning the country, our government and the people) listen to Hansen this time around? I certainly hope so.

If anyone can be the one to say, “I told you so,” he can. The guy had it nailed 20 years ago.