Quotes About Environment

A sign by the highway said DON'T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. 'OK, I the will,' I replied cheerfully

dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.

Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world's largest exporter of woodchips

Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.

Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, We are monitoring the situation closely. For this, read: We are watching them die.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

the beaver and bear nearly

To call human beings 'stewards' of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women.

Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing—less than 3 percent of its budget—on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe

Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm.

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.

If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time.

times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn't enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people's lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.

Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.

During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.

the problem of overgeneration in the summer and undergeneration in the winter.

Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it'll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we'll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century.

In essence, governments can say to each other, "If you want to do business with us, you'll have to take climate change seriously.

Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world's current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).