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Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States. Especially the people who would know best: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and I suspect the other 3 percent are being paid by the fossil fuel industry”.
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Al Franken (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate)
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We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number was down to 44 percent—well
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.
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Hope Jahren (The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here)
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Have you ever, in any mainstream discussion of “climate change,” seen any concern expressed about whether restricting fossil fuel use might increase climate danger by decreasing fossil-fueled climate mastery
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Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
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It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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Every problem in society is caused by or correlated to the inefficient utilization of capital. How do we solve the problems in supply chains? More efficient utilization of capital. How to we solve climate change problems? More efficient utilization of capital. How do we end poverty? The more efficient utilization of capital. How do we improve our education system? The more efficient utilization of capital. How do we transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources? The efficient utilization of capital. Simply by striving to efficiently utilize all capital everywhere, we will by default solve a multitude of problems.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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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.
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Alice Cappelle
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The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history...These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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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.
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Michael E. Mann
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The winning candidate, now the president elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible.
Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump's top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama's temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world's largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump's victory, registered a 50 percent gain.
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Noam Chomsky
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The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.
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Greta Thunberg (No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference)
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What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud enough to save their home. They are a million-and-a-half young people across the globe, on March 15, 2019, protesting climate change; coalitions led by First Nations people, holding back fossil fuel pipelines across Canada; the lawyers and others who converged on airports all over the US on January 29, 2017, to protest the Muslim ban.
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Rebecca Solnit (Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters)
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There are two lessons here: First, weather, climate, and climate change matter—but not nearly as much as they used to, thanks to technology. Climate livability is not just a matter of the state of the global climate system, but also of the technology (or lack thereof) that we have available to deal with any given climate. Second, having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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the public discussion is prejudiced by an assumption that human impacts are bad, which causes us to fear and disapprove of the idea of affecting climate, even though climate is an inherently changing phenomenon that has no naturally perfect state.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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While Obama’s health-care bill was useful in riling up Tea Party protesters, his environmental and energy policies were the real target of many of the multimillionaires and billionaires in the Koch circle. For most of the world’s population the costs of inaction on climate change were far greater than those of action. But for the fossil fuel industry, as Mann put it, “it’s like the switch from whale oil in the nineteenth century. They’re fighting to maintain the status quo, no matter how dumb.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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WE have to take care of this world. WE can't wait any longer. WE need to stop using fossil fuels. Get behind the green new deal. WE are running out of time. Stop being distracted by reality TV shows in the White House. Climate Change is what Reality looks like.
The mud slides are coming. The rain is coming. The timing is all off. The rain could have saved California. Now it is coming to bury the things we've done. This is what you and I are leaving our kids. Wake up. Love one another. Save one another. The Earth is talking to us. LOVE.
- more at the neil young archives website
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Neil Young
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Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following: • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff. Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. “Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come.
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Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History)
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From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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The top eight coal power financiers were Citigroup, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Royal Bank, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley. In 2016, JPMorgan Chase, while paying lip service to the Paris climate accord, poured $6.9 billion into the dirtiest fossil fuels on earth, and was top banker on Wall Street in tar sands oil, Arctic oil, ultra-deep water oil, coal power, and LNG
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Peter D. Carter (Unprecedented Crime: Climate Change Denial and Game Changers for Survival)
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It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people seem to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately to catastrophe: what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out. It has fallen to us, centuries later, to bear witness to the last turn of the wheel. And what we are seeing already -' he paused to point a finger in the direction of the distant wildfires - 'should be enough to remind us that the climatic perturbations of the Little Ice Age were trivial compared to what is in store for us now. What our ancestors experienced is but a pale foreshadowing of what the future holds!
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Amitav Ghosh (Gun Island)
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So if Obama’s energy policy is “all of the above”—which effectively means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins—Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as “None of the below.” It is based on the simple principle that it’s time to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our lives from the abundant energies on our planet’s surface.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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My reading of the evidence is that there is a mild greenhouse effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—warmer—and a significant fertilizer effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—more plant life. I believe that the public discussion is prejudiced by an assumption that human impacts are bad, which causes us to fear and disapprove of the idea of affecting climate, even though climate is an inherently changing phenomenon that has no naturally perfect state.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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ExxonMobil and its corporate cousins in the fossil fuel industry have concrete interests to defend: they fear “stranded assets”—oil and gas in the ground that would be unmarketable or less valuable if limits were imposed on fossil fuel production. In service to profitability, they have tried to shape public policy by distorting the public’s understanding of the threat posed by climate change. They are engaged in an intentional misinformation campaign. They understand the scientific consensus but are trying to obscure it. They do not have a compromised relation to reality; they are corrupt.
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Russell Muirhead (A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy)
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The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.
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Jason Hannan (Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial)
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nearly 80% of the energy consumed in the United States comes from fossil fuels, compared to only 60% of the energy consumed in France. It is thus not surprising that France’s per capita GHG emissions are lower than those of the United States (though it may still surprise that France’s per capita emissions are less than half those of the United States). France’s different energy mix and lower emissions are not simply a matter of luck or circumstance, though they may be experienced that way by some people. Policy choices regarding energy and transport go a long way toward explaining the differences between the United States and France.
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Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
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Climate Change. When we talk about our responsibilities as human beings and as parents, there is nothing more important than leaving this country and the entire planet in a way that is habitable for our kids and grandchildren. The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity and it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and around the world. The scientists are telling us that if we do not boldly transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energies, this planet could be five to ten degrees
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Bernie Sanders (Our Revolution)
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Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.
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Maggie Nelson (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint)
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According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced.
This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.
Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson said:
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
It’s remarkable to note that, more than fifty years ago, an American president was already aware of, and acknowledging, human-created climate change.
Johnson had been briefed on the dangers of CO 2 increases by the famous climate scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle, among others.
So, not only was Johnson aware of the issue, but he was already concerned enough to raise it before Congress. That single sentence in his address gives the lie to the claims of so many climate-change deniers that global warming is some kind of recent hoax.
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Adam Frank (Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth)
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We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in “an upside down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
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In a memo dated September 17, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Counselor to President Nixon for Urban Affairs, later Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and US Senator from New York, explained the science of change to Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor, John Ehrlichman, and warned that sea levels could rise “by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington. . .” Moynihan then went on to say that “it is possible to conceive fairly mammoth man-made efforts to countervail the CO2 rise (e.g., stop burning fossil fuels),” but that “in any event. . ., this is a subject that the Administration ought to get involved with.”48 The first report of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), published in 1970, devoted an entire chapter to climate change, including a section entitled “Energy output—A disappearing icecap?”49
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Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
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Climate change doesn’t always take on such dramatic forms. More often, it’s insidious. Bugs can survive in places they couldn’t before, greatly increasing the threat of tropical diseases, even as far north as Alaska and Greenland. In search of cooler weather, trees, birds, mammals, and other species are creeping up mountain slopes and toward the poles. Spring green-up occurs earlier every year, shifting the timing of thousands of species’ interactions and rapidly shifting growing zones, which throw entire ecosystems dangerously off-balance. Heat waves have become prolonged and deadlier. Wildfire smoke is aggravating chronic illnesses hundreds of miles away from the flames. Air pollution, worsened by fossil fuel burning, kills more than nineteen thousand people a day, making it one of the leading causes of death in nearly every country on Earth. Young people growing up today are seeking treatment for mental health issues in numbers never seen before, in part because they are not always sure they’ll have a livable future.
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Eric Holthaus (The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming)
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The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.
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Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
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They,” he waved his hand out across the world, taking all of it in, every individual life and moment as though it were something that could be measured, known, and grasped, “they’re tired of being lied to. They’re tired of being taken in by this week’s outrage at last week’s Hitler of the moment. They’re tired of finding out that the thing they read on the internet wasn’t true. That cancer’s not cured by these five super foods and that you can, or cannot, see the Great Wall of China from space. They’re tired of having their heroes become all too real every time a celebrity gets busted for sex, drugs, or their disbelief in global warming, climate change, fracking, fossil fuels, cops, guns, or whatever we’ve decided is the new worst thing you can possibly support. When did we get permission to be anything other than what they want us to be? Which is just their heroes. All those people want out there, right now, watching this feed, is for me and my crew to handle this. And be heroes doing it. They want us to do that, they want to see it, and then they want us to come back next week and do it again. They could care less about how I feel regarding the latest war or what people do with their genitalia. They don’t need those things to actually enjoy this show.
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Nick Cole (CTRL ALT Revolt! (Soda Pop Soldier, #0.5))
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Privacy was like cigarettes. No single puff on a cigarette would give you cancer, but smoke enough of the things and they’d kill you dead, and by the time you understood that in your guts, it was too late. Smoking is all up-front pleasure and long-term pain, like cheesecake or sex with beautiful, fucked-up boys. It’s the worst kind of badness, because the consequences arrive so long after—and so far away from—the effects. You can’t learn to play baseball by swinging at the ball with your eyes closed, running home, and waiting six months for someone to call you up and let you know whether you connected. You can’t learn to sort the harmless privacy decisions from the lethal ones by making a million disclosures, waiting ten years, and having your life ruined by one of them. Industry was pumping private data into its clouds like the hydrocarbon barons had pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. Like those fossil fuel billionaires, the barons of the surveillance economy had a vested interest in sowing confusion about whether and how all this was going to bite us in the ass. By the time climate change can no longer be denied, it’ll be too late: we’ll have pumped too much CO2 into the sky to stop the seas from swallowing the world; by the time the datapocalypse is obvious even to people whose paychecks depended on denying it, it would be too late. Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now. It’s way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.
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Cory Doctorow (Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3))
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Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.
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Michael E. Mann (The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet)
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So what then is “climate change”? As the WMO defines it, “climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer).” The important thing to keep in mind here is that the climate changes because it is forced to change. And it is forced to change either by natural forces or by forces introduced by mankind. In other words, the climate varies naturally because of its own complex internal dynamics, but it changes because something forces it to change. The most important natural forces inducing climate change are changes in the earth’s orbit—which change the intensity of the sun’s radiation hitting different parts of the earth, which changes the thermal energy balance of the lower atmosphere, which can change the climate. Climate change, scientists know, can also be triggered by large volcanic eruptions, which can release so many dust particles into the air that they act as an umbrella and shield the earth from some of the sun’s radiation, leading to a cooling period. The climate can be forced to change by natural, massive releases of greenhouses gases from beneath the earth’s surface—gases, like methane, that absorb much more heat than carbon dioxide and lead to a sudden warming period. What is new about this moment in the earth’s history is that the force driving climate change is not a change in the earth’s orbit, not a volcanic eruption, not a sudden natural release of greenhouse gases—but the burning of fossil fuels, the cultivation of rice and livestock, and the burning and clearing of forests by mankind, which together are pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere a hundred times faster than nature normally does.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America)
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One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.
”
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Environmental pollution is a regressive phenomenon, since the rich can find ways of insulating themselves from bad air, dirty water, loss of green spaces and so on. Moreover, much pollution results from production and activities that benefit the more affluent – air transport, car ownership, air conditioning, consumer goods of all kinds, to take some obvious examples. A basic income could be construed, in part, as partial compensation for pollution costs imposed on us, as a matter of social justice. Conversely, a basic income could be seen as compensation for those adversely affected by environmental protection measures. A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Across the world, in rich countries and in poor, governments have long used subsidies as a way of reducing poverty, by keeping down the price of fuel. This has encouraged more consumption, and more wasteful use, of fossil fuels. Moreover, fuel subsidies are regressive, since the rich consume more and thus gain more from the subsidies. But governments have been reluctant to reduce or eliminate the subsidies for fear of alienating voters. Indeed, a number of countries that have tried to reduce fuel subsidies have backed down in the face of angry popular demonstrations.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels.
Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps:
That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.
That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet.
That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.
And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.
I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration.
It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.
”
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers.
we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action.
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Anonymous
“
Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man’s use of fossil fuels.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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[I]f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period’s prejudices.
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William T. Vollmann (No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies)
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a man shouted from the crowd: “How can we help?” Musk didn’t hesitate. “I mean, I know you guys think global warming is real,” he said, close to laughter, “but the crazy thing is, a lot of people out there don’t. It blows my mind.” He wanted his followers to spread the word. “There’s a nonstop propaganda campaign from the fossil fuel industry. They’re just defending themselves. It’s kind of what you would expect”—he shrugged—“but they just, it’s nonstop—and they have, like, a thousand times more money than we do.” The partygoers booed the absent foes. Musk urged them to fight back against the messages that muddied the science of climate change and complicated the advent of a sustainable energy future.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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I didn’t know it yet, but this new priority would mean enormous changes in the way I saw the world and environmentalism. Previously environmentalists worked to stop bad things—pollution, clear-cutting, overfishing—but we more or less accepted the big-picture American economy, with the established industries that made it up. Not anymore. Now we were about to find ourselves in a different business: helping to foster a different kind of economic development, one based on knowledge and technology rather than fossil fuels. After thirty-five years of working to clean up after twentieth-century industrialism, environmentalists were about to plunge into creating its twenty-first-century replacement. But before we could go full tilt toward the new, we had to stop the last spasms of the old—an energy future crafted during George W. Bush’s first term by Vice President Cheney.
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Michael R. Bloomberg (Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet)
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Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell
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Rauli Partanen (Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future? (2017 edition))
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Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.
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Rauli Partanen (Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future? (2017 edition))
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When Barack Obama took office, the fossil fuel industry was not only eager to preserve its perks but also more militant in its opposition to climate change science than ever. Skocpol notes that 2007 had been a turning point in the fight. That year, Al Gore was awarded both a Nobel Peace Prize and featured in an Academy Award–winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The film featured Mann’s hockey stick graph. Gore’s acclaim and Mann’s simple chart helped raise concern about global warming to a new peak, with 41 percent of the American public saying it worried them “a great deal.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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One former insider in the Kochs’ realm, who declined to be named because he feared retribution, described the early donor summits as a clever means devised by Charles Koch to enlist others to pay for political fights that helped his company’s bottom line. The seminars were, in essence, an extension of the company’s corporate lobbying. They were staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project. Of particular importance to the Kochs, he said, was drumming up support from other business leaders for their environmental fights. The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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Are you producing energy or manufacturing something cheaply with fossil fuels? Then, you’re more profitable because you’ve avoided the costs that carbon and air pollution impose on society, from reduced health downwind to global climate change. Do you make a food product that’s profitable? Its high margins could depend on slave labor and deforestation in the supply chain.
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Paul Polman (Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take)
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Exxon knew as early as 1977 that fossil fuels were causing climate change. In what has to be the most morally repugnant corporate campaign in history, Big Oil not only buried the science, they actively spread disinformation.
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Peter Cawdron (Wherever Seeds May Fall)
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SolarCare Solutions
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Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.
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Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
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Climate Activists have turned into Climate Karens.
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Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
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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.
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Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
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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.
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Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
“
There are also political reasons for increased pessimism. When I wrote the first Six Degrees, I did not imagine that the governing political party in the world’s most powerful nation (the US Republican Party) would adopt overt climate denialism as one of its core philosophies. Indeed the prospect would have seemed absurd. I assumed that climate denialism was just a flash-in-the-pan response to heavy political spending by fossil fuel companies. Nor did I expect that this bizarre phenomenon of science denialism would be accompanied by conspiracy theorising and broad-ranging assaults on the very concept of truth throughout the political system, including at the level of the presidency. If the trend towards populism continues throughout the world, overt denial of climate change may become consistently more prominent over future decades, even alongside worsening impacts of climate chaos. Humanity in aggregate, therefore, may not be as clever as many of us like to think. The proverbial boiling frog was at least just a passive and ignorant victim; we would be active and enthusiastic participants in our own demise.
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Mark Lynas (Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency)
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During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels. That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future. The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens, they will only focus on the short term, because they will only inhabit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports, and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.
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Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
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It’s not too late, not quite. Fossil fuel came to dominate our economy a century before we realized that global warming was a threat. That’s one reason climate change has been so hard to bring under control.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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The facts have been piling up for decades. They become more elaborate, and more concerning, with each passing year. And yet for some reason we have been unable to change course. The past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction. A scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change first began to form in the mid-1970s. The first international climate summit was held in 1979, three years before I was born. The NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his landmark testimony to the US Congress in 1988, explaining how the combustion of fossil fuels was driving climate breakdown. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 to set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace. Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.
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Jason Hickel (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
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Still, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. Some of that conviction stems from human ingenuity—watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. And much of that conviction rests on events in my own life over the past few decades. I’ve immersed myself in movements working for change, and I helped found a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign. Though we haven’t beaten the fossil fuel industry, we’ve organized demonstrations in every country on the globe save North Korea, and with our many colleagues around the world, we’ve won some battles.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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I am not sure that energy company executives who say they want to understand the concerns of Indigenous people can actually do so unless they can grasp the emotional weight and social obligations carried by people who balance on the knife-edge of permanent cultural loss.
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Ryan Emanuel (On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice)
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This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. Some of that conviction stems from human ingenuity—watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. And much of that conviction rests on events in my own life over the past few decades. I’ve immersed myself in movements working for change, and I helped found a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign. Though we haven’t beaten the fossil fuel industry, we’ve organized demonstrations in every country on the globe save North Korea, and with our many colleagues around the world, we’ve won some battles.
”
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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Suraj solar and allied industries,
Wework galaxy, 43,
Residency Road,
Bangalore-560025.
Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979
Sun oriented streetlamps are a creative and practical lighting arrangement that bridles the force of the sun to enlighten streets, pathways, and public spaces. In urban communities like Bangalore, where energy proficiency and natural manageability are key needs, the reception of sun based streetlamps has been picking up speed. This article investigates the different parts of sun based streetlamps, including their advantages, estimating factors in Bangalore, an examination of various items, experiences into a main supplier like SuneaseSolar, ways to choose the right streetlamp, and rules for establishment and support.
1. Prologue to Sunlight based Streetlamps
What are Sunlight based Streetlamps?
Sun oriented streetlamps are independent lighting frameworks that bridle the force of daylight to enlighten open air spaces like roads, pathways, and public regions. These lights comprise of sun powered chargers, Drove lights, batteries, and a regulator to deal with the energy stream.
Significance of Sun based Streetlamps
Sun based streetlamps assume a significant part in improving wellbeing, security, and perceivability in metropolitan and provincial regions where customary lattice power might be untrustworthy or inaccessible. They offer a practical and productive lighting arrangement that decreases reliance on non-renewable energy sources and adds to a greener climate.
2. Advantages of Sun powered Streetlamps
Energy Effectiveness
Sun oriented streetlamps are profoundly energy-effective as they work by changing over daylight into power, taking out the requirement for lattice power. This outcomes in lower energy utilization and decreased fossil fuel byproducts, making them an economical lighting choice.
Cost Reserve funds
By using sun powered energy, sun based streetlamps help in chopping down power charges fundamentally over their life expectancy. The underlying interest in sun powered streetlamps is balanced by long haul cost reserve funds because of negligible upkeep prerequisites and no power costs.
Ecological Effect
Sunlight based streetlamps add to natural preservation by using inexhaustible sun oriented energy and decreasing carbon impressions. They help in fighting environmental change and advancing a cleaner, greener planet by diminishing dependence on non-sustainable power sources.
3. Factors Influencing solar street light price in bangalore
Nature of Parts
The cost of sun oriented streetlamps in Bangalore can change in view of the nature of parts utilized, like sun powered chargers, batteries, and Drove lights. More excellent parts frequently bring about better execution and strength, yet may come at a greater cost.
Government Endowments and Motivators
Government endowments and motivators can affect the last expense of sun based streetlamps in Bangalore. Different plans and projects might offer monetary help or tax reductions, making sunlight based lighting more reasonable and appealing for shoppers.
Establishment and Support Expenses
Extra factors like establishment and upkeep expenses can impact the general cost of sunlight based streetlamps. Legitimate establishment and normal support guarantee ideal execution and life span, prompting likely expense reserve funds over the long haul.
4. Examination of solar street light price in bangalore
Market Investigation of Various Brands
A correlation of sunlight based streetlamp costs in Bangalore ought to incorporate an examination of various brands and their contributions. Factors like brand notoriety, item quality, and after-deals backing can affect the cost and generally an incentive for purchasers.
Highlights and Particulars
While contrasting sun powered streetlamp costs in Bangalore, it's fundamental to consider the highlights and determinations presented by various models.
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suneasesolarblr
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Suraj solar and allied industries,
Wework galaxy, 43,
Residency Road,
Bangalore-560025.
Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979
### Embracing Solar Rooftop in Bangalore: A Sustainable Solution for Your Home
Are you keen on reducing your monthly power bills while contributing to a cleaner and more sustainable environment? Investing in solar rooftops could be the answer you’ve been looking for, especially if you're living in Bangalore, a city blessed with abundant sunlight throughout the year.
#### The Benefits of Solar Rooftops
1. **Cutting Down Electricity Bills**: One of the most immediate advantages of installing a solar rooftop system is the significant reduction in electricity bills. Solar panels harness sunlight and convert it into electricity for your home. By generating your own power, you can lower your dependence on grid electricity, which often comes with high charges, especially during peak hours.
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3. **Incentives and Subsidies**: The government of India and various state governments, including Karnataka, offer attractive incentives, rebates, and subsidies for solar panel installations. These financial benefits make the initial investment more manageable, allowing you to reap future savings sooner than later.
4. **Low Maintenance Costs**: Solar rooftops are designed to be durable and require minimal maintenance. Generally, a good quality solar panel can last 25 years or more, with little upkeep beyond occasional cleaning to remove dust and debris. This longevity ensures that the system remains efficient for years to come.
5. **Increase in Property Value**: Homes equipped with solar rooftop systems often experience an increase in property value. As more homebuyers become environmentally conscious, a solar installation can be a selling point, making your property more attractive in a competitive housing market.
#### Sunease Solar: Your Partner in Going Solar
Sunease Solar is paving the way for Solar Rooftop in Bangalore. Specializing in solar rooftop installations, Sunease Solar offers tailor-made solutions that cater specifically to your energy needs. With a team of experienced professionals, they guide you through every step— from assessing your energy requirements to designing a system that maximizes efficiency while fitting within your budget.
#### How to Get Started
The journey to going solar begins with a thorough assessment of your roof and energy consumption. Sunease Solar provides free consultations, allowing you to explore the viability of solar energy in your home. Once you decide to move forward, they will oversee the installation process from start to finish, ensuring that everything complies with local regulations.
After the installation, Sunease Solar offers ongoing support, helping to monitor the system’s performance and addressing any concerns you may have. Their commitment to customer satisfaction and sustainable energy solutions makes them a leading choice for solar rooftops in Bangalore.
#### Conclusion
If you’re ready to reduce your monthly power bills and contribute to a sustainable future, consider investing in a solar rooftop system. With the right partner like Sunease Solar, making the switch to solar can be seamless and beneficial for both your wallet and the planet. It's time to harness the power of the sun and embrace a greener lifestyle—are you ready to take the plunge?
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Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
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Suraj solar and allied industries,
Wework galaxy, 43,
Residency Road,
Bangalore-560025.
Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979
Solar Street Light Manufacturers in Bangalore- SunEase Sun based
As urban areas take a stab at feasible turn of events, sun powered road lighting has become fundamental in metropolitan and provincial regions the same. In Bangalore, known as the tech center point of India, SunEase Sun based is driving the charge in assembling great sun powered streetlamps that add to energy reserve funds and natural preservation.
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Local locations and Lodging Social orders: Improve security and style with sun based road lighting in private zones.
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Provincial and Far off Regions: Sun oriented streetlamps offer a solid arrangement in regions without admittance to lattice power.
Why Pick SunEase Sun powered for Your Lighting Needs?
SunEase Sun powered stands apart among sun oriented streetlamp producers in Bangalore for its commitment to quality, solidness, and state of the art innovation. They focus on consumer loyalty and deal complete help, from item determination to after-deals administration. With an accomplished group and elevated expectations, SunEase Sun based guarantees each venture is customized to meet the client's interesting necessities.
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Solar Street Light Manufacturers in Bangalore
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Consequently, the degrowth movement has attempted to conceal its paganlike militant opposition to fossil fuels and carbon dioxide by mainstreaming its agenda with politically generated and well-funded campaigns promoting what was once called “man-made global cooling,” then “man-made global warming,” and now “man-made climate change.
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Mark R. Levin (Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future)
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Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Carlton Church: Australia in Doubt on Building Nuclear Plant
With the continuous trend of nuclear proliferation, the nuclear-free Australia is in critical dilemma on whether to start the industry in the country or not. On one end of the coin, the negative effects of nuclear generation will surely cause skepticisms and complaints. On the other side, nuclear fuel industry is worth exploring.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been reserved when it comes to nuclear talks but he did admit that “Australia should ‘look closely’ at expanding its role in the global nuclear energy industry, including leasing fuel rods to other countries and then storing the waste afterwards”.
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill set up a royal commission in March to undertake an independent investigation into the state’s participation in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Carlton Church International, non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear use, says there is no need for Australia to venture into nuclear turmoil as they already have an extensive, low cost coal and natural gas reserves. Other critics has also seconded this motion as it is known that even Turnbull has pointed out that the country has plentiful access to coal, gas, wind and solar sources.
During an interview, he also stated, “I’m not talking about the politics. We’ve got so much other affordable sources of energy, not just fossil fuel like coal and gas but also wind, solar. The ability to store energy is getting better all the time, and that’s very important for intermittent sources of energy, particularly wind and solar. But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely”.
A survey was also conducted among random people and a lot of them have been reluctant about the nuclear issue. Some fear that the Fukushima Daichii Incident would happen, knowing the extent of the damage it has caused even to those living in Tokyo, Japan.
Another review also stated, “We only have to look at the Fukushima disaster in Japan to be reminded of the health, social and economic impacts of a nuclear accident, and to see that this is not a safe option for Australians.”
According to further studies by analysts, 25 nuclear reactors can be built around Australia producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. But it also found nuclear power would be much more expensive to produce than coal-fired power if a price was not put on carbon dioxide emissions.
Greenpeace dismissed nuclear power as “an expensive distraction from the real solutions to climate change, like solar and wind power”.
- See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot
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Sabrina Carlton
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But a 2011 study led by Harvard Medical School professor Paul Epstein concluded that from the ground to the power plant, coal indirectly costs the U.S. economy an astounding $345 billion per year, largely because of the associated health care burden from air pollution and because of the climate change impacts.
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Lester R. Brown (The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy)
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Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such. There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm. This is the so-called greenhouse effect: the fact that the earth’s atmosphere contains so-called greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is overwhelmingly the most important, but CO2 is another) which, in effect, trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus, other things being equal, increasing the earth’s temperature. But four questions immediately arise, all of which need to be addressed, coolly and rationally. First, other things being equal, how much can increased atmospheric CO2 be expected to warm the earth? (This is known to scientists as climate sensitivity, or sometimes the climate sensitivity of carbon.) This is highly uncertain, not least because clouds have an important role to play, and the science of clouds is little understood. Until recently, the majority opinion among climate scientists had been that clouds greatly amplify the basic greenhouse effect. But there is a significant minority, including some of the most eminent climate scientists, who strongly dispute this. Second, are other things equal, anyway? We know that over millennia, the temperature of the earth has varied a great deal, long before the arrival of fossil fuels. To take only the past thousand years, a thousand years ago we were benefiting from the so-called medieval warm period, when temperatures are thought to have been at least as warm, if not warmer, than they are today. And during the Baroque era we were grimly suffering the cold of the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames frequently froze in winter and substantial ice fairs were held on it, which have been immortalised in contemporary prints. Third, even if the earth were to warm, so far from this necessarily being a cause for alarm, does it matter? It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster. In fact, we know that, if there were to be any future warming (and for the reasons already given, ‘if’ is correct) there would be both benefits and what the economists call disbenefits. I shall discuss later where the balance might lie. And fourth, to the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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It is true that China is planning to reduce its so-called ‘carbon intensity’ quite substantially by 2020. But there is a world of difference between the sensible objective of using fossil fuels more efficiently, which is what this means, and the foolish policy of abandoning fossil fuels, which it has no intention of doing. China’s total carbon emissions are projected to carry on rising—and rising substantially—as its economy grows. This puts into perspective the UK’s commitment, under the Climate Change Act, to near-total decarbonisation. The UK accounts for less than two per cent of global CO2 emissions: indeed, its total CO2 emissions are less than the annual increase in China’s. Never mind, says Lord Deben, chairman of the government-appointed Climate Change Committee, we are in the business of setting an example to the world.
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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On the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he spoke passionately about climate change, vowing that Americans would look back knowing that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Once in office, he pledged to pass a “cap and trade” bill forcing the fossil fuel industry to pay for its pollution, as other industries did, rather than treating it as someone else’s problem. Cap and trade was a market-based solution, originally backed by Republicans, requiring permits for carbon emissions. The theory was that it would give the industry a financial incentive to stop polluting. It had worked surprisingly well in previous years to reduce industrial emissions that caused acid rain. By choosing a tested, moderate, bipartisan approach, the Obama administration and many environmentalists assumed a deal would be winnable.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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If there was a single ultra-wealthy interest group that hoped to see Obama fail as he took office, it was the fossil fuel industry. And if there was one test of its members’ concentrated financial power over the machinery of American democracy, it was this minority’s ability to stave off government action on climate change as science and the rest of the world were moving in the opposite direction. While Obama’s health-care bill was useful in riling up Tea Party protesters, his environmental and energy policies were the real target of many of the multimillionaires and billionaires in the Koch circle. For most of the world’s population the costs of inaction on climate change were far greater than those of action. But for the fossil fuel industry, as Mann put it, “it’s like the switch from whale oil in the nineteenth century. They’re fighting to maintain the status quo, no matter how dumb.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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by 2008 the arithmetic of climate change presented an almost unimaginable challenge. If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic. If, however, the carbon from these reserves were burned wantonly without the government applying any brakes, scientists predicted an intolerable rise in atmospheric temperatures, triggering potentially irreversible global damage to life on earth.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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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.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: “People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington’s embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued. The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better able to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their communities.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Werner was right to point out that mass resistance movements have grabbed the wheel before and could very well do so again. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that lowering global emissions in line with climate scientists’ urgent warnings demands changes of a truly daunting speed and scale. Meeting science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.7 It will also require coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of road maps.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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If any element of the greenhouse fear turns out to be false—if CO2 emissions don’t cause dramatic warming, if dramatic warming doesn’t cause harmful climate change, or if human beings can adapt well, then CO2 emissions are not catastrophic.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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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.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man’s use of fossil fuels. “Balance” had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority—in some cases extreme minority—views.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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[...] obtenir la baisse de notre dépendance aux combustibles fossiles demande de la méthode et de la gestion, et non une croyance aveugle dans des objets techniques particuliers qui seraient nécessairement adaptés partout et tout le temps.
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Jean-Marc Jancovici (Transition énergétique pour tous : Ce que les politiques n'osent pas vous dire)
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So why are we, any of us, still debating the reality of climate change? Why aren’t all of our political and business leaders joining the cry to rally the Next Greatest Generation to come up with some solutions? A key part of the problem is that many of our richest people made their fortunes in the fossil-fuel industry. To protect their wealth and businesses, they have turned to promoting denial. Conservative politicians get a great deal of their campaign contributions from fossil-fuel wealth, and they have been convinced to interchange the standard statements of scientific uncertainty (e.g. “plus-or-minus 3%”) to mean that we know nothing at all (i.e. “maybe the answer is minus 100%”). Conservative media outlets have obediently played along. This is wrong and dangerous.
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Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
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There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we’re causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations.
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Thom Hartmann (The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction)
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The entire modern enterprise of catastrophic climate change predictions, the enterprise that threatens our energy supply, is based on equating a demonstrated scientific truth, the greenhouse effect, with extremely speculative projections made by invalidated models.
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Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
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After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Using whatever data he could find, Callendar claimed that there had already been a 10% increase in atmospheric CO2 and that an observable, anthropogenic warming had already begun. What became known as the “Callendar Effect” was the claim that the combustion of fossil fuels would lead to increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which would warm the earth.
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Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
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President Johnson said, “[t]his generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
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Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
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1988 was a watershed year for interest in climate change. Scientists were speaking out, bills were introduced in Congress, the IPCC was formed, and the first steps were taken toward an international agreement. This threatened those who were making billions in profits from fossil fuel-related activities and so they began to strike back. In 1989 the leading oil and automotive companies, along with the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC).
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Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
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My undergraduate degree is in engineering. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry with an emphasis on renewable energy resources. And we are running out of the fossil fuel stuff. Not to mention wreaking great harm through climate change.
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David Baldacci (The Innocent (Will Robie #1))