Quotes About Climate

It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" blackened England's skies (which, incidentally, was the beginning of climate change).

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. (...) When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.

Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start immediately.

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.

The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.39

Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early.

global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."21

Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic boat, Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come to tell the truth, to "liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable . . . we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures."53

This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere.

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It's not simply that these cool dudes deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world.

In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling "Decade Zero" of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance.29

Most of these scientists were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover that they were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play my crisis is more urgent than your crisis—war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.

Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them.

All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most.

changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.

It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it's a myth

If you are part of the economy's winning class and funded by even bigger winners, as so may politicians are, then your attempts to craft climate legislation tend to be guided by the idea that change should be as minimal and as unchallenging to the status quo as possible. After all, the status quo is working just fine for you and your donors.