Archive of Quotes of Note

Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge. We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels.”

United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres, while convening the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit, reported in At a Summit on Climate Ambition, the U.S. and China End Up on the B List, New York Times, Sept 20.

Watching TV and seeing everything burn, it’s hard to stay interested in world problems when there won’t be a world. Every summer will be hotter. It will always be worse.”

Italian student Sara Maggiolo, 16, quoted in How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety, by Jason Horowitz, New York Times Rome bureau chief, Sept. 16.

In many parts of the world, including some of the most densely forested, trees are not perfect allies for tree-huggers anymore, and forests no longer reliable climate partners. What was once the embodiment of environmental values now seems increasingly to be fighting for the other side. In some places, fighting harder each year.”

NY Times climate correspondent David Wallace-Wells, in Forests Are No Longer Our Climate Friends, Sept. 6.

Asked what the country should do to combat climate change, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s energy and climate center, said ‘I really hadn’t thought about it in those terms.’”

A Republican 2024 Climate Strategy: More Drilling, Less Clean Energy, by Lisa Friedman, published in the NY Times, Aug. 4.

If anybody in New York is wondering why there’s smoke there, it’s because the fires here are unstoppable.”

Fabrice Mossé, commander of a team of 109 French firefighters battling climate-charged forest fires in northern Quebec, quoted by New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi in ‘The Fires Here Are Unstoppable,’ NYT, June 18.

Fossil fuel divestment is surely one of most useless climate change tactics ever invented. It has had no effect on the companies, or more importantly, the climate. And it never will.”

Veteran journalist Joe Nocera, in Divesting from Big Oil Is an Empty Gesture, The Free Press, June 7.

Fossil fuel companies are producing something that society has been eagerly gobbling up. We have to drastically reduce demand.”

John Holdren, chief science advisor to Pres. Obama (2009-2017), in New York Times, Many Young Voters Bitter Over Biden’s Support of Willow Oil Drilling, April 25. The article, by climate reporter Lisa Friedman, added that Holdren “opposed the Willow project. But he believes that driving down the demand for oil and gas — as the Biden administration is trying to do by expanding clean energy and encouraging electric vehicles — is more effective than blocking drilling. If everyone is driving electric cars, there’s less need for gasoline, the theory goes.”

If the world wants to limit warming, it will have to limit demand for oil and gas because [the oil] industry can deliver this kind of volume for many more decades.”

Espen Erlingsen, a partner at the research firm Rystad Energy, in “Even as Nations Push Renewables, Oil and Gas Projects Come Roaring Back,” New York Times, April 6. (Headline in digital edition: It’s Not Just Willow: Oil and Gas Projects Are Back in a Big Way)

We allow the fossil fuel industry, economists, politicians, celebrities, random people on the internet, the youths that are leading the climate movement — everyone has a stake and a right to comment on these climate policies except, it seems, those of us who have subject-matter expertise in the area. That seems like an odd policy and I take issue with it.”

Earth scientist Rose Z. Abramoff, interviewed on “Democracy Now” about being fired from her research job at the federal Oak Ridge National Laboratory for her public-facing climate protests, Jan 19, 2023 (quote begins at 54-minute mark).

It’s not trade protectionism, it’s a level playing field.”

Pascal Canfin, chair of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, commenting on a preliminary agreement between E.U. member states and the European Parliament to impose a tariff on imports from countries that insufficiently price their carbon emissions, in Europe Reaches Deal for Carbon Tax Law on Imports, New York Times, Dec. 13.

[I]f big change is hard, bigger change is even harder. How are we going to build a whole new economic system [to replace capitalism] if we can’t even enact a carbon tax?”

Elizabeth Kolbert, Climate Change From A To Z: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About The Future., The New Yorker magazine, Nov. 21. (The quote closes the section, “Capitalism.”)

It’s too late to protect everything. To save the climate, we need to build so much wind and solar that some will go in bad places. Not doing so would be much worse. Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial.”

Michael B. Gerrard, A Time for Triage, Environmental Law Institute and Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive, 2022.

If you want to reduce the oil produced, you must reduce the oil consumed. It’s just that simple. If you don’t reduce consumption, and you reduce production in America, they’ll just get that oil from somewhere else.”

Former 4-term California governor Jerry Brown, in Los Angeles Times climate reporter Sammy Roth’s Aug. 4 “Boiling Point” column, Jerry Brown was surprised — and thrilled — by Joe Manchin’s climate deal.

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.