Quotes About Impact

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.

It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact.

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.

The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you're using any product at that kind of volume, you can't simply stop overnight.

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.

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).

Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.

Artificial meats come with hefty Green Premiums, however. On average, a ground-beef substitute costs 86 percent more than the real thing.

Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

All told, fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, and the number will probably rise to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century

But California is a dramatic example of what's going on. Wildfires now occur there five times more often than in the 1970s, largely because the fire season is getting longer and the forests there now contain much more dry wood that's likely to burn.

The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

Consider what it took to achieve this 5 percent reduction. A million people died, and tens of millions were put out of work. To put it mildly, this was not a situation that anyone would want to continue or repeat. And yet the world's greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren't fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

It's aviation, trucking, and shipping—not passenger cars—that account for all the emissions growth in this sector.

The earth is warming, it's warming because of human activity, and the impact is bad and will get much worse. We have every reason to believe that at some point the impact will be catastrophic. Will that point come in 30 years? Fifty years? We don't know precisely. But given how hard the problem will be to solve, even if the worst case is 50 years away, we need to act now.

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%

The typical Kenyan produces 55 times less carbon dioxide than an American, and rural farmers like the Talams produce even less.

Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase "government policy" doesn't exactly set people's hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won't get to zero unless we get this right, and we're a long way from doing that. (I'm talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)

F-gases are extremely powerful contributors to climate change: Over the course of a century, they cause thousands of times more warming than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If you don't hear much about them, it's because they're not a huge percentage of greenhouse gases; in the United States, they represent about 3 percent of emissions.

To sum up: Rich and middle-income people are causing the vast majority of climate change. The poorest people are doing less than anyone else to cause the problem, but they stand to suffer the most from it. They deserve the world's help, and they need more of it than they're getting.

A hotter climate means there will be more frequent and destructive wildfires.