Climate Change Activists Quotes

I don't want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic

You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.

The real power belongs to the people.

...But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of a few.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard. Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.

So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today. So everyone out there: it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.

It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change—even major climate change. It is also true. But political will is not some trivial ingredient, always at hand. We have the tools we need to solve global poverty, epidemic disease, and abuse of women, as well.

We like to see a man calling himself a feminist, but we’re kinda scared when women do. We like to hear white people talk about racism, but we find black activists a bit too aggressive. Or we like to hear business leaders telling us that climate change is crucial and that we need to give up fossil fuels when environmental activists have been saying the exact same thing for years and years. Well, AOC is trying to do the same thing here. She wants billionaires to say TTR because when working-class people do, nobody cares. AOC wanted to use that system to her advantage. She wanted to gain power within that system and the dichotomy between fighting against the system, but using the means of that very system is at the origin of all the criticism she got.

We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things. Where a football game or a film gala gets more media attention than the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. Where celebrities, film and pop stars who have stood up against all injustices will not stand up for our environment and for climate justice because that would inflict on their right to fly around the world visiting their favourite restaurants, beaches and yoga retreats.

Those of us who are still children can’t change what you do now once we’re old enough to do something about it.

So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today. So everyone out there: it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.

It is relevant to note at this point that there is an important distinction between science and scientists. I have the greatest respect for science, whose development has transformed the world for the better. But scientists are no better and no worse than anyone else. There are good scientists and there are bad scientists. Many scientists are outstanding people working long hours to produce important results. They must be frustrated that political activists then turn those results into propaganda. Yet they dare not speak out for fear of losing their funding.

I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.

As an instrument of empowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. "No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches," writes Roy Scranton, "they cannot put their hands on the real flow of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume." Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to "little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance." In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practices is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness.

set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer, and peaked in their consumption of oil, farmland, timber, paper, cars, coal, and perhaps even carbon. For all their differences, the world’s nations came to a historic agreement on climate change, as they did in previous years on nuclear testing, proliferation, security, and disarmament. Nuclear weapons, since the extraordinary circumstances of the closing days of World War II, have not been used in the seventy-two years they have existed. Nuclear terrorism, in defiance of forty years of expert predictions, has never happened. The world’s nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85 percent, with more reductions to come, and testing has ceased (except by the tiny rogue regime in Pyongyang) and proliferation has frozen. The world’s two most pressing problems, then, though not yet solved, are solvable: practicable long-term agendas have been laid out for eliminating nuclear weapons and for mitigating climate change. For all the bleeding headlines, for all the crises, collapses, scandals, plagues, epidemics, and existential threats, these are accomplishments to savor. The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Scientists have exposed the workings of matter, life, and mind. Inventors have harnessed the laws of nature to defy entropy, and entrepreneurs have made their innovations affordable. Lawmakers have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations. Scholars have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of reason. Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have pressured the powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change repressive norms. All these efforts have been channeled into institutions that have allowed us to circumvent the flaws of human nature and empower our better angels. At the same time . . . Seven hundred million people in the world today live in extreme poverty. In the regions where they are concentrated, life expectancy is less than 60, and almost a quarter of the people are undernourished.

When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.” Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.

Second, from local green activist groups up to behemoth NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, over the last twenty years the environmental movement has espoused saving the planet from global warming as its leitmotif. This has had two devastating results. One is that radical environmentalists have worked relentlessly to sow misinformation about global warming in both the public domain and the education system. And the other is that, faced with this widespread propagandisation of public opinion and young persons—and also by strong lobbying from powerful self-interested groups like government research scientists, alternative energy providers and financial marketeers—politicians have had no choice but to fall into line.

The fear of bad outcomes motivates both climate activists and their foes, but the precise details don’t matter. Both sides see themselves as averting a future that they don’t like more than creating one that they do.

One way of ensuring against such a challenge is to surround yourself with people who agree with you. In our dispersed and media-driven society, people are able to immerse themselves in a self-constructed social network where the norm is entirely consistent with their own views. They restrict their information sources to carefully selected news media, websites, blogs, and publications—the so-called echo chamber—that reinforce their views. Tea Party members and environmental activists alike share a distrust of the mainstream media and depend on information sources that speak specifically to their interests and values.

But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.” Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.5

because people have been led to believe that CO2 somehow causes climate change in addition to, not as a consequence of, global warming, it seems plausible to blame individual hurricanes on CO2, even though the temperatures haven’t increased. It is disingenuous for climate activists to blame every storm on climate change when there has been so little warming so far and when storm trends are so unremarkable.

The fossil fuel companies, in short, are no longer dealing with those Big Green groups that can be silenced with a generous donation or a conscience-clearing carbon offset program. The communities they are facing are, for the most part, not looking to negotiate a better deal—whether in the form of local jobs, higher royalties, or better safety standards. More and more, these communities are simply saying “No.” No to the pipeline. No to Arctic drilling. No to the coal and oil trains. No to the heavy hauls. No to the export terminal. No to fracking. And not just “Not in My Backyard” but, as the French anti-fracking activists say: Ni ici, ni ailleurs—neither here, nor elsewhere. In other words: no new carbon frontiers.

You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. You need to vote for us, for your children and grandchildren. What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone. In this election, you vote for the future living conditions of humankind.

Declare an end to the war to save the planet. Then collaborate to save it. We’re not talking surrender. The job we started hasn’t been finished. Conflicts will continue. Much legitimately divides us. But the time for outright war is over. There’s work to do.

Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: ‘It’s easy to be healthy—smoke one less cigarette a month.’ We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail,” wrote British climate activist and author George Marshall. “The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off.

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing “activists” and “regular people” became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.

Sonnet of Climate Change No matter whether you are loaded, All the world's money won't save your child. As our climate gets further compromised, The rich and poor will suffer and die alike. Industry gave us affluence and advancement, But at the expense of our planet's wellbeing. Our ancestors couldn't fathom it back then, We don't have their luxury to be greedy fiend. We barely have a decade to reduce emission, After that all the prayers won't rescue humanity. You think things have been hard in your life, Wait till you hear in grave your children's agony. Enough with this bickering over phony regulation. Discard all luxury and reduce individual emission.

My happy talk about a painless shift to a carbon-free future prompted grumbling from some climate change activists. They hoped to hear me issue a call for bigger sacrifice and harder choices—including a moratorium or outright ban on oil and gas drilling—in order to confront an existential threat. In a perfectly rational world, that might have made sense. In the actual and highly irrational world of American politics, my staff and I were pretty sure that having me paint doomsday scenarios was a bad electoral strategy.

Even in its first year, our “clean energy moonshot” had begun to invigorate the economy, generate jobs, trigger a surge in solar- and wind-power generation, as well as a leap in energy efficiency, and mobilize an arsenal of new technologies to help combat climate change. I delivered speeches across the country, explaining the significance of all this. “It’s working!” I wanted to shout. But environmental activists and clean energy companies aside, no one seemed to care.

Vandalism Ain't Activism (The Sonnet) Systemic change is a slow and tedious process, It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society. If vandalism and activism were one and the same, Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity. Change habits, change yourself, submit to no primitivity, The change that you dream of, be the epitome of that change. Obstructing traffic and refusing to let an ambulance pass, You're not fighting any crisis, but being a crisis yourself. Go fly a kite, it is good for the mind as well as body, Get lessons on common sense before appointing yourself king. The line between activism and terrorism is so thin that, Often many go astray without having the slightest inkling. I repeat, systemic change is a slow and tedious process. The more you rush with recklessness, the more you digress.

Systemic change is a slow and tedious process, It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society. If vandalism and activism were one and the same, Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity.

Vandalism ain't activism.

Plimer condemns the entire movement: “Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred. Much climate ‘science’ is political ideology dressed up as science. There are times in history when the popular consensus is demonstrably wrong and we live in such a time. Cheap energy is fundamental for employment, living in the modern world, and for bringing the Third World out of poverty…. Furthermore, the education system has been captured by activists, and the young are inculcated with environmental, political, and economic ideology. During their education,

Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.

Climate Activists (not all) have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list. BLM activists don't go about abusing white people, Pride activists don't go about harassing straight people, and yet, that's precisely what has become the norm in climate protests. Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.

Climate Activists have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list.

Climate Activists have turned into Climate Karens.

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

The concept of climate refugees is mostly a deliberate exaggeration, designed to turn fear of refugees into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support for lowering CO2 emissions.

It has been said that what we face with this climate crisis is harder than winning World War II, achieving civil rights, defeating bacterial infection and sending a man to the moon . . . combined. So let’s get super duper clear, my dear friends: this is a human despair crisis. Rebecca Solnit: “The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war.” She then added the whopper caveat that nuclear war was something that “might happen, not something that is happening.” I add this: with nuclear war, we all agreed the threat was real and we talked about it openly. We weren’t fighting the science on it. Sure, we’ve had climate change before. And, yep, the planet survived. But this is not the point. No doubt the planet will survive again. There’s just one small problem that we get distracted from. This time, we probably won’t. Or at least, our lives as we know and love them won’t….Scientists and activists have no vested interest in making this shit up. There is no money to be made and no power to be gained from spreading information about the worth of sustainable energy, or consuming less. I said this to someone who challenged me at a dinner party as to my motives behind engaging in climate activism: “We would much rather be at the beach.” Fair point, they replied.

Corporate social responsibility alone seemed too passive, too insular, and too self-serving. In a world that seemed to be literally on fire from climate change and social unrest, corporate social responsibility appeared to many as a privileged exercise in self-improvement, however sincere or not. Corporate self-improvement was not enough for many engaged consumers and citizens; active corporate social improvement through activism was desired and called for.

Contentious social issues like racial justice, income inequality, gun violence, immigration reform, gender equality, and climate change have all become part of many corporate agendas. Silence and indifference are becoming less the norm. The days of simply ignoring social issues or writing a check are gone. Corporations are now frequently expected to engage in social issues through public statements, sponsorships, partnerships, and policies supporting a position or a cause. Being a socially responsible corporation now also means being a socially active corporation.

World would be a far better place if climate change activists were as effective as the Radical Religious Extremists in convincing people about their ideological beliefs.

In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance.29

Still, the volume on climate change keeps getting turned up. Many activists, convinced it is the only important global issue, have made it a practice to blame everything on the climate, to make it the single cause of all other global problems. They grab at the immediate shocking concerns of the day—the war in Syria, ISIS, Ebola, HIV, shark attacks, almost anything you can imagine—to increase the feeling of urgency about the long-term problem. Sometimes the claims are based on strong scientific evidence, but in many cases they are far-fetched, unproven hypotheses.

You do a rally in his backyard. You get lots of people to call his office and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ E-mails, phone calls. You have them confronting him when he goes out to the diner. Again, this is where teaching people how to be good activists comes in. Most people don’t know what to do,” Lonegan said. “So, I would teach people.” The purpose of Lonegan’s effort was not necessarily to drive the Three Taxateers out of office. All three of them kept their seats. The goal was to send a message to the US senators. AFP targeted conservative Democrats such as Senator Max Baucus, who had a significant fossil fuel industry presence in their states. It also targeted wavering Republican senators. By tormenting the New Jersey congressmen, AFP showed that there was a steep price for supporting climate change regulations.