Archive of Quotes of Note

People hoping for bipartisan efforts on climate are probably deluding themselves. Environmental protection is now part of the culture war, and neither policy details nor rational argument matters.”

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, in Why Republicans Turned Against the Environment, Aug.15.

President Biden’s fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman turns one’s stomach. This humiliation should inspire all of us to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy as soon as possible.”

Letter to editor by Tom Miller of Oakland, Calif., published in New York Times, July 19.

The E.P.A. decision may feel like a back breaker, but the policy path to responsible, aggressive emissions reductions looked pretty broken yesterday.”

New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells, in The Supreme Court’s E.P.A. Decision Is More Gloom Than Doom, July 1.

Whatever else this court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change.”

Justice Elena Kagan, commenting on the 6-to-3 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA, quoted in Supreme Court Limits E.P.A.’s Ability to Restrict Power Plant Emissions, by Adam Liptak, in The New York Times, June 30.

Already, the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and sweltering temperatures is so clear that some researchers say there may soon no longer be any point trying to determine whether today’s most extreme heat waves could have happened two centuries ago, before humans started warming the planet. None of them could have.”

Raymond Zhong, How Extreme Heat Kills, Sickens, Strains and Ages Us, New York Times, June 13.

Global warming has made the severe heat wave that has smothered much of Pakistan and India this spring hotter and much more likely to occur, climate scientists with World Weather Attribution, a collaborative effort among scientists to examine extreme weather events for the influence, or lack thereof, of climate change, said Monday. They said that the chances of such a heat wave increased by at least 30 times since the 19th century, before widespread emissions of planet-warming gases began. The relentless heat, with temperatures soaring beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days, particularly in Northwestern India and Southeastern Pakistan, has killed at least 90 people, led to flooding from glacial melting in the Himalayas, contributed to power shortages and stunted India’s wheat crop, helping to fuel an emerging global food crisis. The study found that a heat wave like this one now has about a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year. Before warming began, the chances would have been at least about 1 in 3,000. And the chances would increase to as much as 1 in 5, the researchers said, if the world reaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as it is on track to do unless nations sharply reduce emissions.”

New York Times climate reporter Henry Fountain, in Climate Change Fuels Heat Wave in India and Pakistan, Scientists Find, May 23.

Continued reliance on nuclear power going forward now is part of the price of our collective past failures.”

Drew Keeling, commenting on CTC post, For Climate’s Sake, Don’t Shut U.S. Nukes.

This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way, it will destroy our civilization.”

Svitlana Krakovska, leader of the 11-member delegation from Ukraine to the 2022 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), quoted in ‘This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out, The Guardian, March 9, by Oliver Milman.

Some survivors of the Indian heat wave become ecoterrorists and use swarms of drones to crash passenger planes; no one can figure out how to stop the drones, and everyone gets scared. People fly less. They teleconference, or take long-distance trains, or even sail. They work remotely on transatlantic crossings. It’s not how we want change to happen. But, in the end, the jet age turns out to have been just that — an age.”

Joshua Rothman, “Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?,” a portrait of Kim Stanley Robinson and his 2020 novel, “The Ministry For The Future,” New Yorker magazine, Jan. 31, 2022 issue.

Breaking a long-standing national temperature record is hard (Canada’s old high-temperature record dated to 1937); surpassing it by eight degrees Fahrenheit is, in theory, statistically impossible. It was hotter in Canada that day [Tuesday, June 29, 2020] than on any day ever recorded in Florida, or in Europe, or in South America.”

The Year in Climate: A summer that really scared scientists, by Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, Dec. 16.

We are in a climate crisis. There is no room for the left hand and the right hand to be doing different things. It’s not credible to say you’re fighting for 1.5 degrees while you’re calling for increased oil production.”

Jennifer Morgan, executive director, Greenpeace International, reacting to President Biden’s appeal to OPEC countries to pump more oil, in Even as Biden Pushes Clean Energy, He Seeks More Oil Production, New York Times, Nov. 2.

Pretty wild to see people imply there’s going to be a “next time” for climate legislation. I mean, sure, you can technically pass a climate bill whenever. 2100, even. But I think the nature of the problem has eluded you.”

New Republic contributing editor Osita Nwanevu, via Twitter, Oct. 27.

“The penalty on pollution is really important. All the analyses show that you get big reductions in carbon emissions if you have a penalty on polluting. Take that away, and all you have is another government subsidy for renewable energy.”

Harvard prof. and former Obama advisor Joseph Aldy, on Sen. Joe Manchin’s bid to remove penalties for utilities that fail to rapidly phase out carbon electricity from Pres. Biden’s proposed Clean Electricity Performance Program, in NY Times, This Powerful Democrat Linked to Fossil Fuels Will Craft the U.S. Climate Plan, Sept. 19.

It looks like in 1945. But this is a war without bombs. Nature is hitting back.”

Günter Prybyla, 86, who during World War II spent five days buried under rubble in a bombed-out basement when he was 8 years old. — NY Times, Katrin Bennhold, After Deadly Floods, a German Village Rethinks Its Relationship to Nature, August 6.

Malm’s more tantalizing project, because politically it is more feasible, is for saboteurs to strike at the absurd, obscene carbon gorging of elites – to disrupt unnecessary luxury demand that could be cut off with no pain to people who already have too much.

Christopher Ketcham, in his CTC post, Let’s Blow Up Luxury Carbon, concerning Andreas Malm’s book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” July 22.

Humanity has spent thousands of years building the social organizations and technological mastery to insulate itself from the whims of nature. We are spending down that inheritance, turning back the clock. I don’t believe this reveals our true preference for the world our descendants will inhabit. I believe it reveals our deeply human inability to take the future as seriously as we take the present.”

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, in It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn, July 15.

Increasing the personal income tax rate by 2 percent or 10 percent is not going to make any real difference to multibillionaires. The real action in America is on wealth, not income.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted in Wealthiest Executives Paid Little to Nothing in Federal Income Taxes, Report Says (NY Times, June 8)

This is the fundamental reason conservatives will never join in a good-faith fight against climate change. By its very structure, solving climate requires non-zero-sum cooperation, shared sacrifice, & long-term thinking. Cons oppose those things at a brainstem level.”

Journalist David Roberts, responding to Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeting that “If you stand for Climate Change First, you stand for America Last, ” May 30.

The hue and cry over fossil fuel subsidies in the US is a tempest in a teapot, more a political symbol than a real source of revenue or decarbonization. The big fossil fuel subsidies are the externalities.”

Commentator David Roberts, in Biden’s tax plan goes after the little fossil fuel subsidies, but not the big ones. (Direct subsidies don’t amount to much.), April 9.

Carbon pricing (in the form of higher fuel taxes) may have been the lightning rod [for the Gilets Jaunes uprising in France], but actually the underlying cause was the perceived unfairness of the overall tax reform package, which cut taxes for wealthier households at the same time as hiking up fuel prices. Thus, it is a little clumsy to use the Gilets Jaunes as evidence to suggest higher carbon prices are not possible – they are simply not possible in isolation.”

Josh Burke & Esin Serin, UK carbon pricing needs to be part of comprehensive tax reform, Grantham Institute News, Feb. 22.