Quotes About Environment

ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long.

The world does not have enough resources and energy to give everyone a life of consumer luxury. We could, though, improve everyone's uality of life in different ways.

The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out." —Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 20131

No one has more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic's melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill. Whether they are able to exercise those rights is another matter.

Climate change is indivisible from decolonization.

The World Bank also warned when it released its report that "we're on track for a 4°C warmer world [by century's end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.

The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it's the cheapest way to produce. So

climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how

This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things: corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen." That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13

As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: "People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks.

We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

The fact that the earth's atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out, it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.

la crise du climat pourrait susciter un sursaut citoyen, une secousse venue de la base, capable de répartir le pouvoir entre les mains du plus grand nombre et d'élargir considérablement le domaine des biens communs, lesquels cesseraient ainsi d'être vendus au plus offrant, morceau par morceau.

After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?

The bottom line is this: As we get clean, we have to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery.

The Nature Conservancy, for its part, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from JP Morgan to come up with voluntary rules for fracking.

there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions...And why wouldn't there be? The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it's the cheapest way to produce.

In French, "decroissance" has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.