Politicians can either keep listening to a small number of polluting fossil fuel companies, who're keen to profit from keeping us hooked on oil, coal and gas, or they can listen to the majority of other voices from civil society to business calling for an urgent switch to low and zero carbon heat and power.
About half of all potential future global warming emissions from United States fossil fuels lie in oil, gas and coal buried beneath our public lands, controlled by the federal government and owned by the American people - and not yet leased to private industry for fuel extraction.
As long as a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, get equal time with hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, the public inevitably ends up with a misimpression about the state of our scientific understanding.
This is very dangerous for us, as a society, and I think people deserve a politics of integrity that is not bought and paid for by big banks, fossil fuel giants, war profiteers, insurance companies, the things that those two corporate parties both represent and which pull the strings inside the party.
Our crumbling infrastructure disproportionately harms Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities. The negative health impacts arising from fossil fuel use, industrial pollution, and toxic materials in our homes and schools are literally making us sick.
If we can come up with innovations and train young people to take on new jobs, and if we can switch to clean energy, I think we have the capacity to build this world not dependent on fossil-fuel. I think it will happen, and it won't destroy economy.
For the Navy, developing alternatives to fossil fuels isn't just about fighting climate change - though that's an important side benefit. Biofuels will also play a much more practical role in the Navy's fuel mix, boosting our energy security and supporting the U.S. economy.
The conniving, rich oilmen that were so desperate to prevent and frustrate the Paris Agreement found cheerleaders in Mr. Trump and his party. They choose to protect their profits from a flailing fossil fuel industry over human lives and a clean, inclusive future for us all.
For the life of me, I cannot understand Clinton and her proposed across-the-board tax hikes on individuals, businesses and investors. I cannot fathom her plans for increased regulatory burdens, which include more government-run healthcare and a halt to the fossil-fuel energy boom.
As a lawyer, as a former prosecutor, and as a son and grandson of foreign-service officers who tried to represent American democracy in foreign and dangerous places, the idea that this crowd of crooked fossil-fuel types is able to take over and run our democracy like we are a banana republic - I find that repellent.
If somebody tries to tell me the earth was created in 7 days I take a fossil and say "FOSSIL". If he still won't shut up I throw it at him.
To be clear, I don't know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don't have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it's all smoke and no fire. But there's an awful lot of smoke.
Whenever someone says they believe the earth was created in 7 days, I grab a fossil and say, Fossil. And if they keep talking, I throw it just over their heads.
We need policy change, and the most important thing people can do is to contribute and participate in the political process. We have to vote climate change deniers and people who will create subsidies for the fossil fuel industry out of office. We have to protest when bad decisions are being made about fracking or tar sands.
People are are moving away from the fossil fuel-based economy, to a more renewable economy. That is what is called the 'transition town' movement. There are three hundred towns in Britain that are making this transition. Taking energy from solar power, from wind power, from water power.
[The Center for Industrial Progress'] model allows us to keep conflicts of interest to an absolute minimum as we do our research and writing. As for our relationship with the fossil fuel industry, it's the same as everyone else - they pay for our ideas, we never accept money to voice theirs.
We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.
My idea with '4 Degrees' was to articulate, for a minute, not my ideal vision of how I wanted to perceive my relationship to nature but the reality. If I could give a voice to my behavior, what would that voice be? Taking planes, enjoying first-world fossil fuel, an addict of first-world comfort.
Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
Trusting your energy policy to the fossil fuel lobby is like trusting your health care system to the tobacco lobby.
It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.
Subsidies for the oil, gas and coal industries are projected to cost taxpayers more than $135 billion in the coming decade. At a time when scientists tell us we need to reduce carbon pollution to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absurd to provide massive subsidies that pad fossil-fuel companies' already enormous profits.
Everybody needs to understand that policies are going to change to make it unprofitable if you wreck the planet, those companies that continue exploring and developing fossil fuel resources for which there is no safe use are going to pay a very heavy cost for that.
It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.
I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
If we do not get our act together and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, there is a real question as to the quality of the planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our grandchildren.
We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy.
We really need a public-interest government that is not taking marching orders from the fossil-fuel industry and the banks and the war profiteers. We really need a government that is acting on our behalf.
Decarbonization has already begun, and the appeal of a fossil-fuel-free world is growing - not only because it would limit climate change, but also because it would be more technologically advanced, democratic, resilient, healthy, and economically dynamic.
Other thing we need to understand is that the financial power of the fossil fuel industry has so far prevented even any minor progress. They have a sweetheart deal unlike any other business on Earth: they're allowed to dispose of their waste for free, to use the atmosphere as an open sewer. And they will do all they can to defend that special privilege.
We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.
I’ve always tried to be independent. It’s just my personality. I’ve always been the type to motivate the camp. I’ve always wanted to be the fuel for something—for music, the fuel for my family, the fuel for my best friend. Helping someone with what I’m doing.
The fossil fuel industry commands outsize sway over U.S. politics, markets, and democracy. I knew these companies were formidable, but when I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, I got a close up view of how the industry disregards government safeguards.
In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.
Right now, American government has stepped back from offering any kinds of protection for human rights and public health. And the fossil fuel industry thinks that they have just absolute free rein to go for it. The one thing in the way is public opposition. It's civil society. It's activism.
Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.
Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.
Either we leave our descendants an endowment of zero poverty, zero fossil-fuel use, and zero biodiversity loss, or we leave them facing a tax bill from Earth that could wipe them out.
Because of the industrialization of agriculture -- using massive amounts of fossil fuel -- only 2 percent of Americans work in farming. And yet they produce enough food to feed all 300 million Americans, with plenty left over for export. When are liberals going to break the news to their friends in Darfur that they all have to starve to death to save the planet?
...chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to [should] be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature; [Hansen] accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.
We can combat climate change effectively. What we are lacking now is not the brain power, not the knowledge, not the technology. What we are lacking is the political will power, and we need your help by the millions to tell Congress to stop worrying about their fossil fuel contributors to their campaigns and worry about their kids and grandchildren.
From Portland's ban on large, fossil fuel terminals to Oregon's Clean Fuels Standard and the Clean Electricity and Coal Transition Act, our local actions send ripples through the energy landscape nationwide.
There are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job, yes. But is that a replacement for getting in the way, actively, of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It's not a replacement.
Anger is a fuel. You need fuel to launch a rocket. But if all you have is fuel without any complex internal mechanism directing it, you don't have a rocket. You have a bomb
The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.
We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.
Simply from greening our energy system and eliminating fossil fuel pollution, we get so much healthier that the savings in health care alone are enough to pay the costs of the green energy transition and would repay those costs in approximately a decade and a half in savings.
A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.
At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.
The power the fossil fuel industry exerts over Congress is polluting American democracy, the propaganda it emits through its front groups is polluting our public discourse, and, of course, its carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans - it's a triple whammy and a disgrace.
Most reputable scientists agree that climate change is real and that the effects are likely to be bad. But nobody can say for sure exactly what 'bad' means. The safest and most equitable way out of this horrific mess is simple: cut fossil-fuel emissions.
Millions upon millions of secret spending by the fossil fuel industry that was unleashed by the disastrous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision - this money not only fuels the campaigns of many candidates; it also represents a threat to those who don't toe the polluter line on climate change.
There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.
The fossil fuel industry maintains a science denial operation and a political influence operation designed to do just that. What's good for their business is more important to them than what's good for America.
There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
We need to reject not only outdated fossil-fuel technology, but also an outdated economic system and an outdated corporatist political system. The progressive view is that we are smart enough and ethical enough to not have to be subservient to corporations. We can create our own resilient, localized communities.
A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.
The fossil fuel industry will inevitably have to experience major cutbacks and, over the longer term, near-total demise. There is simply no choice in the matter if we believe the research produced by climate scientists. The profits of oil, coal, and natural gas companies will have to yield to the imperative of sustaining life on earth.
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