Words matter. These are the best Jeff Goodell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The first sign of whether Obama is serious about confronting the climate crisis will be revealed by how he organizes the White House.
In the United States, we do a pretty good job of protecting iconic landscapes and postcard views, but the ocean gets no respect.
With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.
For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia – and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.
You gotta love Rick Perry’s swagger. The Texas Governor is out there in the Iowa cornfields, unabashedly going to toe-to-toe with President Obama, doing his best to instantly cast himself as the big dog in the Republican pack.
The natural gas industry has worked long and hard to smear Josh Fox, the director of ‘Gasland,’ and has failed.
Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words ‘climate change’ in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.
If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for “dangerous” climate change.
In recent years, America’s wealthiest man has begun to tackle energy issues in a major way, investing millions in everything from high-capacity batteries to machines that can scrub carbon dioxide out of the air. With a personal fortune of $50 billion, Gates has the resources to give his favorite solutions a major boost.
If we drill the hell out of everything, including protected public lands and fragile regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America can emerge as an ‘energy superpower.’
In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.
Without electrons, there is no Google. And without clean electrons, there will be no Google customers, since we’ll all be too busy fleeing from rising seas, droughts, and disease.
One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.
Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.
What is likely to vanish – or be transformed beyond recognition – are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.
Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call ‘external costs,’ like the health effects of air and water pollution.
Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.
Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.
President Obama is in no danger of being judged by history as an eco-radical.
In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.
When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good – it just needs to be clean energy.
Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.
Bloomberg’s $50 million is not going to revolutionize the electric power industry. But his willingness to fight is already inspiring others to see Big Coal differently.
When it comes to global warming, coal is the gorilla in the room.
Geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate to offset global warming – is a nightmare fix for climate change.
Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry – the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall.
The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth’s climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.
Today, we’re very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted – all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America’s de facto energy policy.
But overall, Obama’s record on the environment has been uninspired – and that’s putting it kindly. He hasn’t stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.
One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America’s energy problems never give up.
Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.
