Quotes About Climate

significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

At a time when unprecedented wildfires engulf suburban homes in Melbourne, when waters from the rising Thames flood homes in London commuter towns, and when Superstorm Sandy transforms the New York subway into a canal system, the barriers that even the most urban and privileged among us have erected to hold back the natural world are clearly starting to break down.

Angélica Navarro Llanos, "Climate Debt: The Basis of a Fair and Effective Solution to Climate Change," presentation to Technical Briefing on Historical Responsibility, Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bonn, Germany, June 4, 2009.

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.

The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will "lock-in" extremely dangerous warming.

Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible; that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

We need to build a society around the understanding that well-being for all matters more than economic growth. Only then can we truly move away from climate0changing pollution and climate injustice.

ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected

Just as climate denialism has become core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

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.

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.

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

when climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth. It's not (only) because they are paranoid. It's also because they are paying attention.

Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change."37

You have been negotiating all my life." So said Canadian college student Anjali Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011 United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. She was not exaggerating. The world's governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that Anjali, then twenty-one years old, was born.

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.

Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands.

Indeed, the climate crisis, by presenting our species with an existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline, might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many powerful movements bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone mentality, whether it applies to peoples or to places.

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.

The kind of transformation that is now required [to address the climate crisis] will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.

We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the other fundamentally reshape us.