Quotes About Action

their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of

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

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required. There are ways of preventing this

cambiar de rumbo puede salvar vidas a una escala

if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

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

society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.

emissions while raising people's quality of life. We have only a decade.

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.

When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don't lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.

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.

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

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.

I stopped avoiding the articles and the scientific studies and read everything I could find. I also stopped outsourcing the problem to the environmentalists, stopped telling myself this was somebody else's issue, somebody else's job.

Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor.

Step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging. - KC Golden

I'm not stupid, nor a liar," I said, "and if I can't do any good, I can at least do something

I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them.

I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do.

because if I was ever going to, I'd have done it already.

And then he shoved me through the gate.

Don't stand there like a cretin," he said. "Take it.