Archive of Quotes of Note

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.

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.