Archive of Quotes of Note

The morning after he dropped out, Inslee announced he would seek a third term as governor of Washington. A number of journalists tweeted that he would do well as the next Democratic EPA administrator. I disagree. The EPA’s ambit is too narrow, and climate change too sprawling, for Inslee’s time and talents. If the 2020 Democratic nominee, whoever it is, really wants to tackle climate change as their own plan discusses it—as an issue afflicting the whole economy—then they’ll need to show that someone in their administration can tackle it at the whole-economy level. They’ll need to put their money, in other words, where their Medium post is. They could start by calling Jay Inslee. He would make an excellent vice president.”

Robinson Meyer, in For Democrats, When Does Climate Change … Actually Matter?, The Atlantic, August 22.

Germany’s Greens recently learned from a study of voter concerns in Europe that the second-most-popular statement among far-right voters, after one on limiting migration, was this: ‘We need to act on climate change because it’s hitting the poorest first and it’s caused by the rich.’

New York Times, Greens Aim to Make Climate a Bread-and-Butter Issue, July 14.

It’s not surprising that if you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it.”

Christina A. Roberto, health policy expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and lead author of a JAMA study of Philadelphia’s soda tax, quoted in Tuesday Could Be the Beginning of the End of Philadelphia’s Soda Tax, New York Times, May 21.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.”

Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, addressing Parliament  (U.K.), quoted in The Uncanny Power of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric, The New Yorker magazine, April 24.

A decade ago, I thought the most efficient climate policy is making dirty energy more expensive. It is the most efficient, but if politically it can’t happen, well, then it’s not the most efficient.”

NY Times op-ed columnist David Leonhardt, discussing his Sunday Times Magazine article, The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World, April 13. (The quote appears on p. 6 in the magazine’s print edition and is not available digitally.)

I’m looking at global warming — I don’t need to see the graphs. I’m living it and everybody else here is living it.”

Cathy Crain, mayor of Hamburg, IA, referring to the role of climate change in increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, following two record-setting floods that devastated Hamburg in a single decade. — An Iowa Town Fought and Failed to Save a Levee. Then Came the Flood., New York Times, March 20.

“Popular understanding of climate change fails to fully appreciate its irreversibility. Every increment of heat, and every knock-on effect of that heat, is something our species will be dealing with, for all intents and purposes, forever. Can’t ‘get to it later.’ “

Climate blogger David Roberts (@drvox), via Twitter, March 11.

If you really want to innovate, there has to be a cost to carbon pollution. Without that, where is the incentive to innovate?”

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Taxing Carbon Emissions, letter published in The New York Times, Dec. 31.

The I.P.C.C. has sounded many alarms, and the world just keeps smashing the alarm and keeps on sleeping.”

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, quoted in New York Times,
The Paris Accord Promised a Climate Solution. Here’s Where We Are Now., Dec. 14.

Expecting all working people and families to own and maintain a motor vehicle in order to participate in society is more regressive than a carbon tax.”

Tweet by Anthony Ryan (@printtemps), Dec. 9.

I would have been tickled to see success in Washington state, but I never believed an idea this nuanced would survive the last three weeks of the ad wars.”

Massachusetts state Sen. Michael Barrett (D), author of legislation that would establish a state carbon tax, commenting on the defeat of I-1631 in Washington state, in
Carbon advocates won’t quit after a string of defeats, by Ben Storrow, E&E News, Nov. 13.

Issue that will affect my vote? Climate change. Because anything else that we get wrong, we can revise in 10 years. But not this one.”

Susan Donaldson of Cambridge, Mass., with the final word in The New York Times’ “What Motivates Your [Midterms] Vote” letters section, Sunday, Oct. 21.

What once seemed random climatic misfortune now occurs more predictably.”

As Storms Keep Coming, FEMA Spends Billions in ‘Cycle’ of Damage and Repair, Kevin Sack & John Schwartz, NY Times, Oct 8.

Our most sweeping, impressive, and consequential project as a species is the global effort to get as much ancient life out of the ground everywhere it exists, and into the air as fast as possible.”

Tweet by journalist Peter Brannen, commenting on Saudi Aramco’s Manifa shallow water oilfield, Sept 9.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine July report connecting global warming to the increased risk and severity of certain classes of extreme weather — like some of the heat waves, floods and droughts we’re experiencing — carries the same scientific import as the U.S. surgeon general’s 1964 report connecting smoking to lung cancer.”

NY Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, paraphrasing Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at the science and news organization Climate Central, in What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?, Aug. 14.

In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future.”

Robert Vautard, senior scientist, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris, in This Summer’s Heat Waves Could Be the Strongest Climate Signal Yet, reported by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, July 28.

The climate is changing far more quickly than Republican attitudes.”

R L Miller of ClimateHawks, in House Votes to Denounce Carbon Taxes. Where Was the Climate Solutions Caucus?, Inside Climate News, July 19.

Conservatives sometimes underestimate how individual choices have collective consequences, and liberals sometimes underestimate how economic incentives affect individual choices.”

Donald Shoup, Parking And The City, Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2018, p. 53.

At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.”

Trump’s White House is a Black Hole, by Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, and an official in the Reagan, Bush-41 & Bush-43 administrations, The New York Times, March 3, 2018.

The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat. Win soon or suffer the consequences.”

Bill McKibben, in Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing, Rolling Stone, Dec. 1.