Archive of Quotes of Note

There’s long been a hope that repeated climate crises will force Republicans to enlist in the fight to stop, or slow, climate change. How can you ignore the crisis when it is your constituents who are frozen, your home that is underwater? But what we saw in Texas is the darker timeline — a doom loop of climate polarization, where climate crises lead, paradoxically, to a politics that’s more desperate for fossil fuels, more dismissive of international or even interstate cooperation.”

NY Times columnist Ezra Klein, in Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened, Feb. 25.

A cry for survival comes from the planet itself”

President Biden, in his inaugural address, Jan. 20.

Carbon pricing is key. All firms across our economy need to pay the price of polluting the planet.”

Janet Yellen, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, 2014-2018, and president-elect Biden’s apparent choice for Treasury Secretary, quoted in The 41 Things Biden Should Do First on Climate Change, Bloomberg Green, Nov. 11, 2020.

The time of fossil fuel subsidies is over. Coal must be phased out. Carbon should be given a price. 2021 must be the year of a great leap towards carbon neutrality.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, via Twitter, Nov. 16.

They should get out the vote in Georgia because Biden has just shown us what’s possible there. That’s what will make climate action possible. Forget the whole question of compromise. That’s not even an option right now. Even if you only want ‘incremental progress,’ you’re not going to get it without a Democratic senate.”

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, quoted in Inside Climate News, With Biden’s Win, Climate Activists See New Potential But Say They’ll ‘Push Where We Need to Push’, Nov. 8.

Dealing with one crisis at a time was a luxury that is now over, and climate change has become the ‘threat multiplier’ we knew it would be.”

Mary Annaïse Heglar, 2020: The Year of the Converging Crises, Rolling Stone, Oct 4.

“The best thing that Joe Biden could do would be to speak in clear, exciting visionary terms about exactly what he plans to do to tackle the climate crisis, racial inequality and economic inequality.”

Sunrise Movement organizer Varshini Prakash, quoted by Michelle Goldberg in her NY Times column, How the Green New Deal Saved a Senator’s Career, Sept 4.

The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable. If he comes with an ambitious template to address climate change, all of a sudden, everyone is going to follow his lead.”

Entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, quoted in Vox.com post by Zack Beauchamp, Andrew Yang said the smartest thing about Biden at the DNC, Aug. 20.

The depravity knows no bounds. Methane doesn’t linger for centuries like CO2, but over the near term, it’s a far more potent climate change forcer. What sickness leads people to scoff at urgent warnings from expert bodies? What cowardice prompts GOP officials to abet this evil?”

Sierra Club president emeritus Dave Scott, tweeting in response to a report in the New York Times that the Trump administration is making good on its threat to eliminate Obama-era rules limiting emissions of methane from leaks and flares in U.S. oil and gas wells (August 10).

[The Democrats’] agenda is shaping up to have two defining features. The first is reducing inequality . . . The second is acting on climate change.”

NY Times columnist David Leonhardt, It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?, July 10.

if you’re distressed by the devastating costs of covid-19 wherever officials have dismissed and denied the science and public health warnings — wait til you see the vastly greater costs of the same officials’ same dismissal and denial of climate change.”

New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch), on Twitter, July 2.

I and other activists in my community are focused on issues that feel like immediate life or death, like the environment.”

Scranton, Pa. resident Kaitlin Ahern, 19, quoted in June 30 NY Times story, ‘I Can’t Focus on Abortion Access if My People Are Dying’, about younger U.S. women’s lower prioritization of abortion rights vis-a-vis other justice issues.

In one of the stupidest statements in history, Trump just said ‘if we didn’t do any testing, we’d have very few cases’ of the pandemic coronavirus. Thus introducing the Republican solution to #climatechange: just stop reading the thermometers.”

Peter Gleick (co-founder, Pacific Institute; MacArthur “genius award” recipient; member, National Academy of Sciences), via Twitter, May 15.

If you wait until you are absolutely sure a worst-case scenario could happen, you have almost certainly missed the chance to avoid it.”

Journalist David-Wallace Wells (“The Uninhabitable Earth“), discussing the COVID-19 crisis, on Twitter, March 17.

We have seen the unfolding wings of climate change.”

Australian filmmaker Lynette Wallworth, quoted in “The End of Australia as We Know It,” by Damien Cave, New York Times, February 16.

The dangers of climate change are no longer predictions about the future.”

NY Times op-ed columnist (and 2008 Nobel laureate in economics) Paul Krugman, in “Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal,” The New York Times, January 2.

Until there are penalties for emitting carbon, clean alternatives will just meet new energy demand. They are not currently displacing ‘fossil fuel use to any great extent’ and will not in the future.”

Robinson Meyer, commenting on three linked articles by the Global Carbon Project, in 5 Big Trends That Increased Earth’s Carbon Pollution, The Atlantic, Dec. 3. The quote is from the project’s article in Nature Climate Change (links are in the Atlantic article).

The next U.S. president can save more lives and better improve human health by slowing climate change than by improving health insurance.”

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, in The Most Pressing Issue for Our Next President Isn’t Medicare, October 27.

“In terms of CO2’s greenhouse effect, today’s world is already as far from that of the 18th century as the 18th century was from the ice age.”

What Goes Up, The Economist, Sept 21-27 (subscription required).

You shouldn’t be able to externalize these costs. That’s the problem with fossil fuels.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at the Democratic presidential candidates’ climate debate, Sept 4. [link TK]