Archive of Quotes of Note

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.

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.