Quotes from Jeff Goodell

The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry?

Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.

The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.

One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America's energy problems never give up.

Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline.

This Dewdrop World is a beautiful, courageous, intimate film about love and loss. It may also be the deepest meditation on climate change that I've ever seen.

The natural gas industry has worked long and hard to smear Josh Fox, the director of 'Gasland,' and has failed.

When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.

Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.

Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.

To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.

But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also happens to be the 10th richest person in America, with a personal fortune of some $18 billion, likes to pick a fight - especially fights where the line between good and evil is particularly stark.

Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.

Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.

Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.

Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.

What is likely to vanish - or be transformed beyond recognition - are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.

With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations.

Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.

Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.