Quotes About Urgency

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke ("more signs of the Apocalypse!"). Which is another way of looking away.

So, let's summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South

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

It just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

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.

Kennelijk willen veel van ons vandaag de eerste run doen,' zei Alfie op die opgewekte toon waarop een ander wellicht zou zeggen: 'Zo te zien gaat het regenen vandaag!' terwijl het al met bakken uit de hemel komt en je onder een luifel staat te schuilen met vijf anderen met een mes in hun hand, en jij voorzichtig je hand in je zak steek om je pistool te pakken.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

Tengo cosas que hacer. Después tendré toda la vida para morirme.

We don't have time now. We have to be home before dark. Yes! Saved! I thought. Then Ashley said, We'll do it tomorrow. Nooooo!

Stop being picky!" yelled Mandy. "You're down to twelve minutes and you still have to swipe your credit card!

Her father drove up and down car aisles, looking for a good slot. Who cared about a good slot? Just park the car already!

When someone's rattling on about blocked toilets, collapsing marquees, and penis-shaped birthday cakes, it's hard to convince yourself that you're in a life-or-death situation.

And nobody had told them that they were short on time.

If you have to say something, you have to say it now. And now more importantly, you have to do it yourself. It's your life, you're the one who dies, you're the one who loses it.

If you want to do something, you have to do it now. If you want to say something, you have to say it now. And more importantly, you have to do it yourself. It's your life, you're the one who dies, you're the one who loses it.

When I need things to happen, I need them to happen now, you know. I don't want to be having a meeting about a meeting about a meeting, which is what can happen in Britain.

I never knew how tough it was to play that 14-second shot clock mentality.

There can be no more burying our heads in the sand by being afraid to even mention the words 'climate change' aloud.

There are two things that Jack Bauer never does. Show mercy, and go to the bathroom.

He is in a gunfight right now. I'm gonna have to take a message.

You know Washington. If the deadline is midnight, they'll start working on it at 11:30.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

Like the canary in the coal mine, the climate changes already evident in the Arctic are a call to action.