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Global Warming Quotes

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Global Warming Quotes

“Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.”

“Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.”

“We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.”

“There are quadrillions of dollars in oil and other resources hidden beneath the ice in the Artic, enough to even make the wealthiest in the world drool. But how to get to those resources without it costing them money? If they use technology to warm up the atmosphere enough to melt that ice, that would work. But then, how to explain to the world why the ice caps are melting? Call it 'Global Warming' and blame it on the population.”

“I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.”

“The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.”

“If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be. We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.”

“The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.”

“One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.”

“[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”

“We, of all the beings that we know of, can think. We can eat, write, build, save. We can predict, estimate, and count. We can preserve food for lifetimes, and in times of crisis, we can find ways to ensure our survival. With each passing generation, our sphere of control of our existence is larger. What if the earth is hit by an asteroid or there is no way to stop global warming? We look to colonize other planets. The fate of our species, in a few years, will not be tied to the fate of the earth. Our home planet must be cared for ... but as we go interplanetary and then interstellar, our control on our lives and the evolution of our species grows. As far as we know, we are the only species that has a say in the development of its future.”

“Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we've been trained, by a bouyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss categorically as hyperbole. Here, the facts are hysterical, and the dimensions of the drama that will play out between those poles, incomprehensibly large. Large enough to enclose not just present day humanity but all of our possible futures as well.”

“By the end of the cold war, the prospect of nuclear winter had clouded every corner of our pop culture and psychology - a pervasive nightmare that the human experiment might be brought to an end by two jousting sets of proud, rivalrist tacticians. Just a few sets of twitchy hands hovering over the planet's self-destruct buttons. The threat of climate change is more dramatic still, and ultimately more democratic, with responsibility shared by each of us even as we shiver in fear of it. And yet we have processed that threat only in parts, typically not concretely or explicitly, displacing certain anxieties and inventing others, choosing to ignore the bleakest features of our possible future and letting our political fatalism and technological faith blur as though we've gone cross-eyed into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us - at no cost. Those more panicked are often hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism. Over the last few years, as the planet's own environmental rhythms seem to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn't happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that it's causes are unclear. Suggesting that the changes we are seeing are the result of natural cycles rather than human activities and interventions. It is a very strange argument. If the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension. That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair, however incomprehensibly large and complicated we find the processes that have brought it into being. That we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all it's punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely. Global warming is after all a human invention and the flip-side of our real time guilt is that we remain in command. No matter how out of control the climate system seems; with it's roiling typhones, unprecedented famines and heat waves, refugee crises and climate conflicts; we are all it's authors and still writing. Some, like our oil companies and their political patrons are more prolific authors than others. But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villians to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act.”

“Don’t forget that the land is always out there, making its way, doing everything it can so you can breathe fresh air; so you can eat fresh food; so you can move and see and feel and think, and it’s on your side. The world is out there doing what it’s been doing way before you came here, it’s firm and strong and it takes a lot to bring it down. so from time to time, just go outside and look at this spectacle. This pure painting right in front of your eyes. No one created it. No one owns it. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It simply is. So maybe, try a little tenderness. Just give it a chance to do what it can do. Just let it help you breathe and eat and move and see and maybe just try to live your life in a way that doesn’t kill this force of nature that is just trying to give you a world worth living in. A clean world. A fresh world. Paths, forests, oceans, animals, oxygen, water. That’s all it takes. Just try a little tenderness towards this world we’ve been lucky enough to build our homes on. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.”

“I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late”

“[Trump] is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide license to impose one's will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the cusp of catastrophic warming. He is the product of a business culture that fetishizes "disruptors" who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regularity standards. Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs and superheroes who will save humanity.”

“If you want to leave something for your children, leave a better world, not heaps of money, because at the rate our ancestors screwed up this world and at the rate we are sustaining their stupidity in our pursuit of limitless productivity, soon all the money in the world will not be enough to save our children from imminent disaster.”

“Change - I beg you - change for your children - for their health, sanity and prosperity. Stop buying every single new nonessential technology - stop wasting electricity - stop wasting fuel on carefree long drives - stop voting candidates impressed by their charm.”

“We have been taught that life is a fight and a struggle. We have been taught to fight, because of the the idea that man has to continuously fight for his survival. We have been taught to fight, because of the idea that man and nature are enemies. Nature is not our enemy. Nature is our home. The universe is not antagonosiotic to us. The universe means the earth, which the universe fills with flowers, trees, animals, people, rivers and mountains. The universe is supporting them. Why would the flowers, the trees and the rivers otherwise grow? Man is part of this existence. But the idea that we have to fight creates a separation between us and the whole. Man becomes an isolated island. Then we live in fear, anxiety and worry. So how can we be happy? Instead we feel alienated, alone and meaningless, because the whole seems to be a constant fight and struggle. For the person who have been fighting with existence, death seems to be the ultimate thing. But for the person who have surrendered to existence, who is in tune with existence, death is not the ultimate thing. Surrender means to let go of your ego, so for him there is no death. It is only the egothat dies, because the ego is a separation from the whole. Itis the ego that fights with the whole. Surrender means to drop all that is superficial and shallow. Surrender means to become egoless. Surrender means that our heart starts to beat in tune with the universal heart. Instead of being an isolated island, we become part of the whole continent. And then we live in love, joy, silence, trust, truth, freedom and the eternal. Suddenly we know the joy and beauty of surrender. Surrender means to yes to the whole.”

“Denial is our very real, personal response to our own trauma. But denial is the normative response to trauma—by everyone. Society may deny that anything bad ever happened to us. It may deny that DID exists. But that doesn't mean to say it's right. All it says is that like global warming, our histories and our stories are an "inconvenient truth".͏”

“We are living through an absolutely crucial juncture in human history, when the externalities of our current economic system are coming home to roost. These include misinformation (courtesy of 'Big Tech'), global heating (thanks to 'Big Oil'), and wealth inequality (exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies). Together, these interlocking crises are buffeting our political institutions, threatening to envelop them in a vortex of partisanship and chronic instability. Looming over these challenges is the threat of societal disruption from AI and the imminent collapse of a rules-based international order. At such a time, what we need more than ever is a big vision, a narrative to help people make sense of the bewildering world we live in, and political courage. Both things that seem distinctly lacking from our political class.”

“The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed.”

“The feminism we have in mind recognizes that it must respond to a crisis of epochal proportions: plummeting living standards and looming ecological disaster; rampaging wars and intensified dispossession; mass migrations met with barbed wire; emboldened racism and xenophobia; and the reversal of hard-won rights—both social and political.”