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.)
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →“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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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,
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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.
Continue reading →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
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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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →Climate change is not a future threat; it is happening now, and we are paying for it in lost lives and billions of dollars in damage.”
Michael Bloomberg & Jerry Brown, The U.S. Is Tackling Global Warming, Even if Trump Isn’t, The New York Times, Nov. 14.
Continue reading →When we viewed photographs and film of the annihilated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we sensed that the world could be ended by nuclear weapons. Now these hurricanes [Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria] have conveyed a similar feeling of world-ending, having left whole islands, once alive in their beauty and commerce, in ruin.”
Robert Jay Lifton, Our Changing Climate Mind-Set, NY Times, Oct. 7.
Continue reading →[We have been] engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.”
David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York magazine, July 9. (Quoted by David Roberts in We have no system to deal with escalating climate damages. It’s time to build one, at vox.com, Sept 21, in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.)
Continue reading →I don’t think my statements are going to change the way the administration thinks or the governor thinks, but let me tell you, people are afraid. People are understanding there is a new normal now.”
Miami (FL) Mayor Tomás Regalado (a Republican), in Harrowing Storms May Move Climate Debate, if Not G.O.P. Leaders, NY Times, Sept 14.
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