Environment Quotations

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For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.…We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49), author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and

It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
~ Greenpeace advertisement New York Times 1990-02-25

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 73)

One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.
~ Michael Anissimov 1995

Contrary to popular belief, we do not face a choice between economy and ecology, It is often said that protecting the environment would constrain or even undermine economic growth. In fact, the opposite is true: unless we protect resources and the earth’s natural capital, we shall not be able to sustain economic growth.
~ Kofi Annan (born: 1938-04-08 age: 71) Secretary General of the United Nations

Don’t blow it — good planets are hard to find.
~ Anonymous

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!
~ Isaac Asimov (born: 1920-01-02 died: 1992-03-06 at age: 72) Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer

Global warming threatens the survival of our species.
~ Lucien Bouchard (born: 1938-12-22 age: 70) Environment minister in the Conservative Mulroney administration of Canada

We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last day of the age of oil.
~ Mike Bowlin (born: 1943-02-20 age: 66) Chairman and CEO of ARCO petroleum

The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.
~ Edmund Burke (born: 1729-01-12 died: 1797-07-09 at age: 68)

Discovery peaked 30 years ago. It takes no feat of the imagination. It takes no feat of intellect to conclude we now face the corresponding peak in production in 2005.
~ Gordon Campbell, geologist, addressing the British House of Commons.

Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war.
~ Environment Canada (The Canadian equivalent of the EPA)

Takeover consists in diverting some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our kind. Our pre-Sapiens ancestors, with their simple stone tools and fire, took over for human use, organic materials that would otherwise have been consumed by insects, carnivores or bacteria. From about 10,000 years ago, our earliest horticulturalist ancestors began take over land upon which to grow crops for human consumption. That land would otherwise have supported trees, shrubs or wild grasses and all the animals dependent thereon — but fewer humans. As the expanding generations replaced each other, Homo sapiens took over more and more of the surface of this planet, essentially at the expense of its other inhabitants.
~ William Catton Jr. (born: 1926-01-15 age: 83), Overshoot 1980

From the point of view of the other species on earth, we humans are as welcome as Viking invaders or pancreas cancer.

Only the extinct don’t change.
~ Chris Chandler

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild lifes become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
~ Anton Chekhov (born: 1860-01-29 died: 1904-07-15 at age: 44)

Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms.
~ Helen Chenoweth-Hage (born: 1938-01-27 died: 2006-10-02 at age: 68) Rep, R-Idaho, testifying to congress about her delusions. She has such a sectarian view of the world, that she can only grasp science in terms of warring cults.

Switching to light-coloured roofs and roadways would have the equivalent effect on greenhouse gas emissions to taking one billion cars off the road for eleven years.
~ Dr. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics 1997, (born: 1948-02-28 age: 61)

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)

If everyone lived the way people do in Vancouver, we would need three more entire planets to support us.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 61)

Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming (born: 1900-10-14 died: 1993-12-20 at age: 93)

You do not have to change: survival is not mandatory.
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming (born: 1900-10-14 died: 1993-12-20 at age: 93) On Overcoming Resistance to Change

In parts of Montana, salt concentrations is soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.
~ Jared Diamond (born: 1937-09-10 age: 72) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed page 47

Natural selection is engineering; sexual selection is art.
~ What Females Want and Males Will Do a PBS Nature Documentary.

“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
~ Eric Drexler (born: 1955-04-25 age: 54) Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

But we are almost certainly going to miss our [global warming] deadline. We cannot get the 10 lost years back, and by the time a new global agreement to replace the Kyoto accord is negotiated and put into effect, there will probably not be enough time left to stop the warming short of the point where we must not go.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 66) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.

So humanity is doomed by its own stupidity, like a monkey in a trap holding a banana refusing to let go to free itself.

The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 66) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.

The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 66) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.

There is a point of no return after which warming becomes unstoppable — and we are probably going to sail right through it. It is the point at which anthropogenic (human-caused) warming triggers huge releases of carbon dioxide from warming oceans, or similar releases of both carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, or both. Most climate scientists think that point lies not far beyond 2°C (4°F) C hotter.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 66) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.

I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait ’til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)

The best evidence indicates that we need to reduce our CO₂ emissions by 70% by 2050. [Kyoto round one aims for only 6%]. If you own a four-wheel drive, and replace it with a hybrid fuel car, you can achieve a cut of that magnitude in a day, rather than half a century. If your electricity provider offers a green option, for the cost of a daily cup of coffee, you will be able to make equally major cuts in your household emissions. And if you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducing CO₂ emissions, you might change the world.
~ Tim Flannery (born: 1956-01-28 age: 53), The Weather Makers

Although they [light and medium trucks] have only 5% of the transportation market…, they account for fully 35% of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transportation.
~ David Suzuki Foundation 2002-09

Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle, and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers.
~ David Suzuki Foundation 2002-09

In contrast, a bicycle weighs about 1/8 of the weight of its rider, and it can get as low as 1/50.

Do more with less.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)

The earth is like a spaceship that didn’t come with an operating manual.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun. As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.
~ Al Gore (born: 1948-03-31 age: 61) Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway 2007-12-10

Producing usable oil from the tar sands is a dirty, energy-intensive process — tar sands production generates between three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions that conventional oil extraction.
~ Greenpeace

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
~ J.B.S. Haldane (born: 1892-11-05 died: 1964-12-01 at age: 72)

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm… If the present overshoot of this target CO₂ is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.
~ James Hansen (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61) along with 14 other scientists in Science 2005-06-03

Analogously, you can’t do it until you need glasses, because by the time you need glasses, you have set in motion an irreversible process that leads not only to blindness but to death.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO₂, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.
~ James Hansen (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61) along with 14 other scientists in Science 2005-06-03

Why did business people rise to the occasion to fight Nazi Germany, but fund FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) to delay dealing with global warming? They saw WW II as an economic windfall, but see the even bigger threat of global warming as purely a liability ignoring the huge opportunities for an exploding world market who will have no choice but to buy green energy. They still don’t get it that profits fall to zero when global warming decimates workers and customers.

A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area’s biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 24

The more species, the greater the biodiversity, the more stable an ecosystem is. When you start killing off half the species, the ecosystem becomes much more fragile, and more susceptible to complete collapse from even minor disturbances.

Because nitrous oxide [released by nitrate-fertilised soil] is 296 times stronger than CO₂ at global warming, and methane [cow farts] is about 23 times as potent as CO₂, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all the cars, trains, busses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 33

We have no choice but to reduce our consumption of meat, to use it more like a condiment, the way the Chinese do. The first step is to stop the astronomical agricultural subsidies on fodder and meat to let it gradually rise to its true market price. LetsActNow.org

When the Europeans first arrived in North America the average depth of the topsoil was 53.34 cm (21 in), and it was rich in the types of symbiotic organisms necessary for plant roots to absorb minerals from the soil. Today North America averages around 15.24 cm (6 in) of topsoil and most if it is exhausted of nutrients and much is devoid of life.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 22

As any gardener can tell you, you can’t get soil much thinner than that and still grow anything. Yet, even knowing the rate of erosion, farmers persist in the agricultural practices that strip the soil. They refuse to look ahead any more than one year.

Climate change is no longer a doomsday prophecy, it’s a reality.
~ Astrid Heiberg (born: 1936-04-14 age: 73) president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. … We don’t often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 59) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies

The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity, and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 59) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies

We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice — not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives — will have profound ethical and political ramifications.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 59) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies

We have unintentionally, begun to disturb massive planetary systems that have kept much of the world climate relatively hospitable to civilisation for the last 10,000 years. We are heating the deep oceans, which leads to more frequent and intense El Niño weather patterns. The time of the seasons is noticeably altered and most of the Earth’s glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. The potential effects are catastrophic. They include the drowning of coastal cities and whole island nations, as a result of rising sea levels and intensified storms; the proliferation of disease-spreading insects into new regions, resulting in cases of malaria perhaps doubling in tropical regions and increasing 100-fold elsewhere; and the loss of forests and wildlife that depend upon a stable climate, leading to vastly increased extinction rates and the collapse of entire ecosystems.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 59)

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. … Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants], and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 59) on why carnivores starve first when food gets tight.

When the price of ‘carbon’ reaches $100 a tonne, then it will become an economically viable business proposition to start taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere and sequestering it underground.
~ Thomas Homer-Dixon in Energy and Climate Change: A Sustainable Future?

Around the world people are dying, ecosystems are crumbling, and economies face ruin because of climate change, and all Bush and the oil industry can think of is how to maximise their profits and continue business as usual.
~ Paul Horsman , Greenpeace spokesperson

In the central North Pacific, plastic outweighs surface zooplankton 6 to 1.
~ Thomas M. Kostigen , reported in Discover Magazine.

By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 90) article Lovelock is more pessimistic than the consensus, because he thinks man will refuse to take significant action to ameliorate global warming.

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 90) article

The Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 90) article

It might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century to cut global warming down to size.
~ Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton (born: 1940-02-21 age: 69)

A 3 mpg increase in the auto and light truck fleet is worth 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day.
~ Ernest Moniz, Professor of Physics, born 1938

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
~ Ralph Nader (born: 1934-02-27 age: 75) 1980

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 48)

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 22°C (72°F) at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 48)

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 48)

Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It’s time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth’s climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.
~ Naomi Oreskes, 2004-12-26 science historian

We shouldn’t be feeding corn to SUVs when people are starving.
~ Oxfam

Pangloss is admired and Cassandra is despised and ignored. But as the Trojans were to learn to their sorrow, Cassandra was right, and had she been heeded, the toil of the appropriate preparation for the coming adversity would have been insignificant measured against the devastation that followed a brief season of blissful and ignorant optimism… Today, Cassandra holds advanced degrees in biology, ecology, climatology and other theoretical and applied environmental sciences.
~ Dr. Ernest Partridge (born: 1935-05-14 age: 74) Perilous Optimism

When a women breast feeds her infant, she is dumping her lifetime supply of pollutants into her baby. If she were to bottle her breast milk, it would be illegal to carry it across state lines because it is so polluted. Pollutants concentrate with each level of the food chain. Every time you eat a pound of swordfish, a fish 6 levels up the food chain, you eat the concentrated contaminants collected from the sea water by 453.59 tonnes (500 tons) of diatoms.
~ Dr. Roger Payne n the Sir David Attenborough documentary Planet Earth

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
~ Michael Pollan (born: 1955-02-06 age: 54) Farmer In Chief New York Times 2008-10-12

America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark, and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn’t it be more efficient just to swap recipes?
~ Michael Pollan (born: 1955-02-06 age: 54) author of In Defense of Food

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
~ Native American Proverb

If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.
~ Ronald Reagan (born: 1911-02-06 died: 2004-06-05 at age: 93)

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?
~ Robert Redford (born: 1936-08-18 age: 73) Yosemite National Park dedication 1985

Rising ocean temperatures linked by some studies to tropical storms are very likely a result of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research. The lead author of the new study, Benjamin D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the Energy Department, said the findings suggested that further warming would probably make hurricanes stronger in coming decades… The researchers compared a century of observed temperature changes with those produced in more than 80 computer simulations of how oceans respond to natural and human influences on the climate. The simulations were generated on 22 different computer models at 15 different research centers. The simulations correctly mimicked the cooling caused by plumes from volcanic eruptions, which temporarily block the sun. At the same time, the authors said, the only warming influence that could explain the changes in the oceans was the buildup of heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases in the air.
~ Andrew C. Revkin Study Links Tropical Ocean Warming to Greenhouse Gases, New York Times 2008-09-06

2005 was the most destructive hurricane season on record. 2008 was second. The longest lived hurricane on record was Bertha in 2008. Hurricanes are fueled by warm ocean water. In 2004-03 the first-ever reported hurricane in the South Atlantic hit southern Brazil. The record 11 hottest years have all been in the last 13 years. It amazing how many people pretend to deny global warming in the face of such facts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A coal-fired electric plant in the USA burns an entire trainload of coal every 12 hours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A corporation will happily bribe politicians to enact policies that will make earth uninhabitable if they think it will improve the next quarter profit by 1%. They are like children with super powers and no conscience or thought for the morrow.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A disposable diaper takes 236.59 mls (1 US cups) of crude oil to make the outside cover. It sits at least 500 years in landfill, far longer than the child will live. It requires felling four mature trees to create the absorbant pads for one child’s supply of diapers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.

A lawnmower produces more emissions per hour than a car. They have no emission controls.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A modern metaphor for evolution might be American Idol. A motley random assortment of mostly untalented people present themselves to the judges. The judges winnow the pack down to an ultimate winner, who is remarkably talented. The judging process is anything but random. Imagine a world where the next generation of contestants were sired only by American Idol winners. That’s evolution. Nature does the judging and ruthlessly condemns the losers to early death for almost any imperfection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A single virus or bacterium can’t hurt anything, but when they multiply into the billions, all doing the same thing, purely as a side effect of their existence, they bring down elephants. Similarly, when humans breed into the billions, our daily activities kill a planet in a couple of centuries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A squirt of water and a blast of warm air, would be more effective, and environmentally friendly than a wad of toilet paper.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A tiny foreign species of water plant invades your pond, and it doubles the area covered each day. Let’s say it takes 6 months to cover half the pond. How long will it take it to cover the entire surface? Answer: one more day.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

About 1/3 of the CO₂ greenhouse gas we pump into the air dissolves in the ocean making a weak carbonic acid solution similar to Coca-Cola. It dissolves the tiny skeletons of the plankton that produce most of the world’s oxygen. If you have ever kept tropical fish (marine or fresh) you know how exquisitely sensitive they are to pH (acidity). We are foolishly flipping off the switch to life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

According to Dr. Peter D. Ward in Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future one of the great mass extinctions of the past was triggered by global warming stopping the ocean conveyor (large ocean currents). The oceans stagnated and gave off hydrogen sulphide, (a gas more toxic than hydrogen cyanide) in such massive quantities that it killed off 90% of all life on earth, both plants and animals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

All modern humans descended from a group of 2000 people who lived 70,000 years ago, and most of us descended from an even smaller group of 150 people. 2000 is about the enrollment of my high school. It amazing how so few people notice how alike we all are and that you can’t help but marry a not-that-distant cousin.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Americans are extremely reluctant to embrace green technology. The bright side of this is the world will leave them in the dust — a nation of candle and buggy whip manufacturers. They have been too powerful in the past, throwing their economic and military weight around.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Americans are like a woman with diabetes who has just discovered a cache of chocolate caramels. She can’t eat them anyway. Americans imagine if they scrounge enough oil or natural gas, they can still get by on it for the next century.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Americans pump 80,000 different industrial chemicals into the environment. They don’t seem to get it that their food and water comes from that same environment they are treating as a toxic dump site. They close their eyes tight and even refuse to even test the effects of the chemicals. It is like someone pouring their waste household chemicals into the cornflakes and wondering why they don’t feel as chipper as they used to.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Anything less than 100% recycling is not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than even the most optimistic computer climate models predicted. Oddly, the scientists refer to this as the computer models being too conservative. They don’t mean conservative in the sense of erring on the side of safety. They mean erring on the side of predicting too little change. You could also say they mean conservative in the sense of too much conservative, Christian-right, god-will-rescue-us-from-any-folly, wishful thinking.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

As the oil runs out, what about coal? Optimists imagine that higher energy prices will make it economic to exploit those high-sulphur, hard-to-extract, impure coal deposits enough to last us another 200 years. However, the giant machines needed to mine coal consume 757.08 litres (200 US gallons) of diesel fuel an hour. If you can’t get back more energy than you spend mining, processing and transporting the coal, no matter how high the price of coal climbs, mining coal is still not an economically viable proposition. According to John Gever in Beyond Oil, if current trends continue, by 2040, it will cost $1.00 to extract every $0.50 worth of energy from coal. This means coal will buy us only a few more decades. Further, coal it is about the worst fuel imaginable when it comes to greenhouse and toxic gas emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

At the Copenhagen U.N. climate conference in 2008-12, Canada won an award — the Colossal Fossil, for Stephen Harper’s exceptional work blocking action on climate change not just in Canada but also in other countries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Because of man’s political inability to control overfishing, according to Dr. Boris Worm, he will have driven every single species of edible fish to collapse by 2048. Collapse is defined as population below 10% of normal without the ability to ever recover, leading to eventual extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Man is such as insatiably greedy animal. He is driving not only the ocean fish, but himself to extinction with it.

Because of peak oil, the price of fuels have to eventually rise out of sight. This means food imported from more that a few kilometres away will be prohibitively expensive. This means the new trendy will be growing vegetables in your front yard and raising chickens, rabbits and ducks in the back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Britain and Germany have already reached their Kyoto targets. Canada and the USA lamely bleat it is too difficult to even try. How can you help but be ashamed to be a citizen of such loser countries?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Carter mandated improved fuel efficiency. It improved 50% in a few years. Subsquent presidents did nothing in that regard. The result, no improvement since. Clearly leaving fuel efficiency up to the car companies does not work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Christians are the biggest roadblock to the survival of mankind. Not only do they refuse to take responsibility for protecting life on earth, they interfere with others who do. The problem is they are deluded into thinking their god will clean up after every mess man makes, and prevent anything seriously terrible from happening even though there is no evidence he has ever done so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Consider how much we humans have given up by overpopulating. Almost nobody can afford a house with 40 hectares (98.84 acres) surrounding it. Japanese people resort to robotic pets since real ones are not permitted in tight quarters. We have wars over water and land to grow food in Africa and Israel. We have destroyed the very forests that purify the air we breathe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corn as biofuel is a fraud. It produces more CO₂ than regular gasoline since there is so much CO₂ released tending the corn and distilling the ethanol. It only makes sense economically because of the $5 billion a year in American agricultural subsidies originally intended to ensure plentiful, inexpensive food. Further, taking land from agricultural production for biofuel creates food shortages and increases food prices. And finally burning the corn is 81% more efficient than making it into ethanol.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporate executives, and oil company shills like George W. Bush in the USA and Stephen Harper in Canada love to whine about the impossibly onerous 1% extra cost it will take to deal with global warming. Yet oddly, they have no concern at all about economist Stern’s estimated 20% cost of the consequences of doing nothing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Do the math. Anything less than 100% recycling cannot be indefinitely sustained.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Dropping a birth control pill into the toilet is about the most harmful thing you can do to wild fish. The pills work even better on fish than people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Each year, Americans discard 38 billion aluminum cans, discard, not recycle. This would be enough to create an aluminum dome covering New York City.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.

Each year, our species burns fossil fuel that took nature 300 years of sunlight to create. Because we have cut down half our rainforests, we are making CO₂ 600 times faster than nature can capture the carbon back into new fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Economists have the same naive world view as medieval Europeans. They believe the earth has an infinitely large surface with infinite resources that can sustain endless economic growth. If the world were the size of a basketball, the biosphere would be thinner than a layer of varnish, hardly infinite.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Even though scientists predicted the global-warming drought, extreme heat and wildfires in western Australia, when the 2009-02 wildfires exploded through New South Wales fanned by the 47°C (117°F) heat, the media never once mentioned global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Even with the recent temporary drop, Americans are up in arms at high oil prices and the way America is hostage to foreign oil. The biggest single buyer of oil on the planet is the US military. They have bid the prices up with their wasteful consumption of oil. An aircraft carrier gets about 58,804 litres/100km (0.004 mpg). Using fuel efficiently and protecting the environment are simply not on the military’s radar.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Even without modern technology, Easter Islanders were able to wipe out all the trees, then all the birds then most of the edible shellfish before the islanders decimated themselves down to about 100 people. Granted, it took them 200 years to accomplish the destruction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Exxon claims their algae biofuel “absorbs CO₂” and hence helps reduce greenhouse gases, but they don’t tell you that when you burn the biofuel all the CO₂ is released again, making the fuel carbon neutral, with no net CO₂ reduction. This sort of dissembling and lying from big energy is the norm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Exxon Mobile uses a incredibly narrow-minded decision-making process. To decide what do to about global warming they compute that lying to the public about global warming and opposing all measures to ameliorate it will help them make more profit selling oil and gas in the next quarter. In their view, that global warming leads to mass extinction of most of life on earth is irrelevant. That procrastinating measures to save earth until it is too late is similarly irrelevant. Even the long term bankruptcy of Exxon is irrelevant. All that matters is the next quarter profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

For millions of years, man lived sustainably, then suddenly, in the name of progress, he got it into his head to burn oil and coal, to poison the water and air, to bloat the population, to level the forests, to despoil even the remotest parts of earth and to inject massive quantities of green house gasses into the atmosphere to wipe out more species than the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaur. Man bleats ‘I have no choice. The economy makes me do it.’ And this suicidal loon dares to call himself more advanced than his predecessors?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

For most animals, the odds of on early death are overwhelming, yet they are not discouraged. The odds of the human race going extinct in the next century are high too, but if we allow ourselves to become discouraged, we will have no chance at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

For most of the last 10,000 years the earth has been in equilibrium, radiating out into space the exact same amount of heat as it absorbed. However, today, due to green house gas warming, the earth absorbs 1.8 watts more per square meter than it radiates. It does not sound like much, but it amounts to roughly running a toaster 24/7 on every 1,011.71 sq metres (¼ acres) plot of the planet. However, this heat does not dissipate; it steadily accumulates, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

For most people, a global average temperature rise of 3°C (5°F) does not sound alarming. They don’t understand that the warming is uneven, mostly over the continents which will rise 6°C (11°F). The maximum annual temperature will increase considerably more. Paris will have the temperature of Algiers, Moscow the temperature of Paris, San Francisco the temperature of Tijuana and New York the temperature of Charleston, and Houston the temperature of some obscure dusty town in southern Mexico.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

For the human species to be sustainable, couples must have an average of 2.00 children surviving to adulthood. If they have less, the population dies out. If they have more, you get environmental collapse, war, pestilence and famine. Religions, pressing for greater market share, irresponsibly urge their adherents to breed as much as possible. If some couples have more than two children it necessitates others having fewer. Only China seem to understand just how anti-social overbreeding is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Frogs have survived whatever nature could throw at them for 200 million years. Now frog species are going extinct left and right. Why? because we humans are spreading the herbicide atrazine, a chemical similar to frog sex hormones on our fields. Even microscopic doses make male frogs develop eggs in their testes or develop ovaries. Farmers don’t seem to realise they need frogs for purely economic reasons to help control insects.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

From the point of view of a new disease organism, our technological civilisation seems custom-tailored to help it spread. We transport diseases around the entire planet within hours on airliners; we move them around in food transported tens of thousands of miles; we congregate in tight spaces like buses, elevators and office buildings each day to exchange microorganisms. Even our greeting ritual, the handshake, exchanges more germs than had we ritually drunk each other’s urine. We have undone all we have evolved/learned in millions of years to control disease, namely live in small groups and be wary of contact with strangers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Glacier National Park in Wyoming used to have 150 glaciers in the time of Theodore Roosevelt. Today they are only 35 left. At the current rate of melting, they will all be gone by 2030. This is not just a matter of higher temperatures, it is a matter of insufficient water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Global warming is not a monster under the bed. If won’t go away if you refuse to believe in its existence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK, pointed out that the Copenhagen Climate Conference is the last chance mankind has to get its act together on global warming. “There is no Plan B.” Logically, Brown should order MI5 to assassinate any world leaders who fail to co-operate. I can’t imagine a better justification for murder/war than preventing the extinction of mankind. If, out of squeamishness, climate change deniers are permitted to prevail, they will kill us all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Have those loons who talk about ‘conquering nature’ ever thought about what would happen if they succeeded?’
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

How do you know a disinfectant is less harmful than the bacteria it purports to kill?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Humans are such contradictory creatures. Some blast endangered whooping cranes out of the air with shotguns. Others dress up in crane costumes and spend endless hours in ultralight aircraft teaching the cranes to fly and migrate. Some shoot harpoons into whales for the sheer joy of killing. Others risk their lives to help free beached whales or whales caught up in nets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Humans drive other species to extinction by hunting, by taking over their habitat, by carrying diseases, by bringing in invasive species in from afar, by competing for food, by polluting, by causing climate change… Instead of homo sapiens perhaps we should have called ourselves homo deleotus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Humans go to great lengths to protect their offspring from germs, sexual predators, terrorists and drugs, but do utterly nothing to protect them from dangers even more likely to seriously harm them such as global warming, environmental collapse, nuclear war and junk food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Humans have lost their survival instinct. They have plenty of money for oversized cars, video games and drugs, but none for cleaning up global warming, clean water and clean air.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Humans will spend a fortune to impress their friends, but won’t spend an extra 5% for poison-free, non-manufactured food for their children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I am becoming resigned to living in the last century when man was the dominant life form on planet earth. Man is far too self-centred, far too concerned with instant gratification, far too willing to impose suffering on others for trivial gain to himself, to do what he needs to do to survive. I do my best to goad my species to appropriate action while I simultaneously console myself with thoughts of how quiet and beautiful earth will become again without him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I am so revolted by my species, its greed, its warring, its sadism, its poisoning of the environment, its cruelty to other species, its refusal to think ahead more than a few months, its superstition… that I think it best humans go extinct as soon as possible. I just hope we can take ourselves out cleanly without wiping out nearly all the other species in the process.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I am surprised that anyone would ever buy a Kraft or General Foods product knowing their parent company Philip Morris Tobacco, aka Altria, lied to its customers about the dangers of tobacco, thus killing them off. Similarly I am astounded anyone would ever again trust Nestlé after they lied to their customers about infant formula in ways that killed their infant customers. Why would you ever give a company that tried to kill you a second chance to succeed?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I don’t understand this naive trust people have in corporations, claiming they need even less oversight than individuals. Corporations have proved themselves negligent by triggering the biggest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs, brought on global warming and destroyed the forests which act as the lungs of our planet just to mention three of their major eco-crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I kid you not, a friend of a friend refused to participate in the Earth Hour lights out, because she believed global warming was caused by undersea volcanoes and that it would thus be more natural to leave her lights on.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I saw a woman wrestling with plastic grocery bags that broke and spilled tins of food onto the sidewalk. Why did she resist using reusable canvas bags? They won’t break. They carry much more. They would be easier on her hands. They wouldn’t breed under her sink like coat hangers. They wouldn’t clog land fills for generations. Perhaps it is some remnant of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption that drives her to suffer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I think it all but certain man will go extinct within the next century or two. The interesting question is, how much of the rest of the tree of life will he take with him when he goes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you are in a hospital and someone stands on your oxygen hose and refuses to get off, giggling with glee, you might be able to claim self defence if you shot him. Yet lunatics endanger even more people by releasing greenhouse gases, and the law prohibits you from even whacking them across the knees with a baseball bat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you bike instead of drive:

• You will be doing your part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• You will be healthier. Biking is an exercise program that requires no willpower. You get your exercise as a side effect of commuting.
• You will be saving the cost of car payments, gas and insurance.
• You will be doing your part to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
• You will be using less road space, reducing the need to pave over land.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you use a hair dryer, over its lifetime, you will consume 0.68 tonnes (¾ tons) of coal for the electricity to run it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.

If you went to visit a friend in hospital, would you cut his oxygen flow in half, reduce his IV drip in half, and double the morphine pump rate without first asking a doctor if this were a wise thing to do? Of course not! Yet humans, as a whole, have done something far more irresponsible to spaceship earth’s life support systems without consulting experts, namely cutting down half the planet’s forests, draining half the wetlands, and doubling the amount of green-house-gas-producing nitrogen entering the soil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you were watching Jeopardy, and Alex Trebek said ‘No, the first world war was in 1929’ millions of people would write to complain. Yet when equally incorrect assertions appear on TV, in books or even in school lectures, almost nobody complains, because this is religiously protected misinformation, with even higher sacred cow status than the existence of Santa Claus. We don’t realise how ridiculous it is, because we are so familiar with the religious myths. It is just as silly as if Christians started asserting John McCain were 200 years old, and pounced on anyone who dared suggest otherwise, providing of course no evidence at all for this bizarre assertion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If your house smells as industrially clean as a mall washroom, your guests will know you are an ecological vandal. You do the most damage to the environment with detergents, degreasers, stain removers and pesticides. Look for green alternatives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine a future where every species has sufficient habit to guarantee its continued survival.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine a group of people trapped in a rickety elevator and the cable has snapped. They are plummeting down ever faster. The Republicans and Christians reassure the others that there is nothing to be concerned about. It is perfectly safe. See, nothing too painful has happened yet. God would never let anything terrible happen. They are like Americans facing a world in environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine a man with twenty terminal diseases who refuses to stop smoking, heavy drinking and taking recreational drugs. He is insanely optimistic about his chances, based on the observation he hasn’t died yet despite a lifetime of abusing his body. He is like a Republican facing a world in environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine a planet about 75 light years from earth, just next door by astronomical standards. From that vantage point, what is special about earth? Earth is just one of nine planets circling around one of the 5000 suns within 75 light years. However, since emissions from earth that left in 1934 are just arriving, it appears that earth has just started to emit radio waves after 4 billion years of silence. Also the atmosphere has suddenly started to change with drastically increased CO₂ and methane, presumably a side effect of the activities of lifeforms there.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine being in a car. When you take your foot off the gas, the car still accelerates. When you hit the brakes, nothing happens. This is like today’s technological society accelerating to its destruction with overpopulation, over-production and environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In Argentina, soy farmers burn square miles of forests every day. Why? So they can grow soy for ten years before the soil is utterly depleted, and blows away unable to grow even weeds. We desperately need these forests as the lungs of the earth. There are nowhere near enough trees as it is to absorb all the CO₂ we have already produced.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In Germany, there are more people building windmills than building cars. Why are we North Americans so reluctant to get on with alternative energy, knowing full well there is an exploding captive market for it? Why do we so desperately want to be the Johnny-come-lately?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In one summer, in France 10 times as many people died from global ‘warming’ than died on 9/11. Which is the bigger threat?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In the Irish potato famine, within weeks, a spore wiped out all potato plants of the Lumper variety. Since the Irish planted nothing but Lumper potatoes, an eighth of the Irish starved to death. You’d think we would have learned the lesson about putting all our eggs in one basket and the danger of monoculture. Yet today, we are repeating the same mistake, this time world wide, with the Russet Burbank, the potato variety used for French fries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Inuit and native people can’t have it both ways — using modern motorboats, winch driven nets, exploding harpoons and guns with the traditional attitude that man has a right to kill as much as he pleases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is a myth that a frog placed in warm water, slowly heated will allow itself to cook to death. It will jump out. Frogs have a much better sense of self-preservation than humans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is hard to watch the earth deteriorate at the hand of environmental Philistines. There is some comfort in knowing they will suffer first and hardest from their vandalism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It takes 7 trees to recycle the exhalations of one human. That does not count the CO₂ generated by cars, electric power generation agriculture or goods transport to support that person.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

James E. Hansen of The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, when he studied the paleontological record, discovered that when the world’s glaciers start to melt, they melt very quickly resulting in a rise in sea level of 1 metre (39.37 in) every 20 years. Even a rise of 2 metres (6.56 ft) would inundate many cities including London and New York. The Vancouver International Airport would have to be abandoned. The current planning is based on overly optimistic estimates made before this was known.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Just what will it take for the public to stop kidding themselves about global warming, imagining if they ignore it will cease to exist?

• Florida vacation property flooded out.
• the World Trade Center site under water.
• a couple of Katrina-sized hurricanes a year to hit the USA.
• a dust bowl sized drought in the American heartland.
• over a million refugees in north eastern India and Pakistan fleeing the flood plains.
• death of most of the world’s forests.
• death of all the planet’s coral reefs where rich American tourists used to go snorkeling.
• mass extinctions of most species, including nice cuddly mammals.
• death of most fish in the oceans, replaced by giant poisonous jelly fish, as already happened to the coastal waters of Japan.
• stinking algal blooms on waterways and lakes.
• crop failures all over the world from drought and freakish weather.

’Noah, how long can you tread water?’
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Klebsiella planticola is a microoganism found on the roots of every plant species on earth. It helps them absorb nutrients. A company in Oregon decided to genetically modify the organism to produce alcohol from plant waste for biofuel, then sell the remaining sludge as fertiliser. By happenstance, Michael Holmes, a student needing a project for his PhD thesis, decided to test the new lifeform for toxicity, and discovered that it killed any plant it touched by producing twenty times more alcohol on its roots than it could withstand. What looked like such a great green idea on paper turned out to be a bioweapon that could have killed all plant life on earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Looking back on previous generations, the main thing I wanted of them was not to drive animals extinct and not to destroy natural habitat. I could care less about their battles and empires. Future generations may judge us similarly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Mankind is setting himself up for some unimaginable grief because he cannot understand global warming. The layman personally experiences a wide local temperature swings throughout a year, and so can’t appreciate what a catatrophe even a few degrees change in average global temperature implies. To the willfully ignorant, global warming sounds a bit like Monty Python’s comfy chair torture device. Were it not for Hollywood, he would similarly pooh pooh the global havoc a meteorite a small fraction of the size of the earth can do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Many business people have decided dealing with global warming is hopeless, so they have decided to lie to everyone else that there is no emergency, so that they can loot, drink and be merry in the last days of techno civilisation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Man’s paralysis in the face of global warming makes as much sense as refusing to get out of the way of an avalanche because it would disrupt a poker game.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Men of Stephen Harper’s generation are deciding to do nothing about global warming imagining it will slightly increase their personal wealth. The people who have to live with the consequences, have no say. No other creature, save corporate man, sacrifices the next generation for the current.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

More land in North American is devoted to lawn than any other crop, even wheat or corn.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Most animals do their best to be an inconspicuous as possible, to modify their environment as little as possible. I would love to see a mainstream architectural aesthetic develop along these same lines.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Most people think that creating the thermonuclear bomb was mankind’s biggest mistake, the invention most likely to lead to his demise. I have another candidate, the corporation. With an effect similar to absentee landlords, corporations blind those who run and own businesses to the consequences of their actions. Corporations are happily destroying their own and man’s life support system — the biosphere. They have no more common sense than tent caterpillars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Nature has learned that anything less than 100% recycling is not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Nature teaches us that to be sustainable, you must recycle absolutely everything.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is 296 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO₂. Yet the world agrifuel corporations plan to triple the amount of nitrogen entering the world‘s soil, a process which releases N₂O. Even as it is, almost half of green house gases come from agricultural monoculture, and its attendant long distance transportation and fertilised production. Nitrogen fertiliser is made using natural gas, whose production has already peaked in North America. The world adds the equivalent of the entire population of North America every 6 years. We are already seriously short of food. Agrifuel diverts food from feeding people to feeding SUVs for the conspicuously-consuming wealthy. The bottom line is agrifuel is a dead end, pun intended.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

No others species but humans and the domestic goat do something to the environment that prevents future generations from living there.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Ocean ice has a way of melting very slowly at first, then faster and faster, until suddenly it is all gone. Why? Snow reflects 87% of the heat from the sun. But after it melts and exposes a bit of ocean, the water reflects only 7%. In other words, when ice melts, the earth’s surface turns instantly from the best reflector to the best absorber of heat. Technically, this is referred to as the albedo effect. In the arctic, much of the lost ice can never be regenerated, because the open ocean absorbs too much heat. The arctic is more melted today that it has been at any time in the last million years. Because of albedo, there is no way to refreeze the arctic; all we can do now is prevent it from melting even more.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Oil exploration is a bit like an Easter egg hunt. To start, you gather the easy-to-find eggs, and then work your way to the harder-to-find ones. You can always find one more egg, but it takes increasingly more time and effort until it reaches a point the game isn’t worth the candle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Our kids are going to say ‘What were you thinking! Didn’t you know about global warming? Why didn’t you do anything? What was so all-fired important that you procrastinated our very survival? What you did is unforgivable.’
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

People use cars and houses to display status. This is why they so stubbornly refuse to make them energy efficient. Conspicuous waste the essence of status display.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Planets can’t support continuous civilisation; it is too exhausting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Rejecting the carbon tax is the adult equivalent of refusing to eat your vegetables.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Republicans tell us that the $3,000 billion they have spent on the Iraq war is good for the economy, but spending $10 billion to implement this year’s Kyoto target would break the economy. It is clearly not the amount bothering them, but rather whether they are the ones who get the money. Consider also that all you get back from the investment in the Iraq war is some large holes drilled into the other side of the globe. In contrast, every penny invested in clean energy will save you over and over in reduced foreign oil imports.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Scientists are extremely embarrassed about showing emotion. They are fond of British ironic understatement. For example, they refer to an extinction event that wipes out 1/3 of all species on earth as a disruption. So it is no surprise they selected the terms global warming and climate change to describe what ordinary people would have called climate chaos, climate collapse or climactic Armageddon.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Scientists know that CO₂ is extremely powerful. 635 million years ago, over a span of a mere 200 years, CO₂ from volcanoes raised the average temperature of the earth from -50°C (-58°F) to 50°C (122°F).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Since global warming hurts us all, what cars people buy is no longer purely a personal decision.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The average North American needs 14 times as many trees to absorb the CO₂ emissions (primarily from burning fuels) as does an African. The USA thus has the population equivalent of of 4.3 billion Africans when it comes to global warming. The scary part is much of the third world are learning to live like Americans too — the net effect is like a lethal population explosion. The really scary part is we have nowhere near enough trees even as it is, and we are killing them off at an unprecedented rate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The average pair of blue jeans have already logged over 41,842.94 km (26,000 miles) in the air before you put them on.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61),, source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.

The Dow Jones is an index of how fast man is destroying the environment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The easiest way to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer is to increase the number of deaths due to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So take care interpreting statistics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The five cowboys of the apocalypse are cars, chainsaws, cattle, coal and cement. These are the major means man is using to crank up the global thermostat with CO₂.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The good news is there a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered in terms of improving the efficiency (mileage) of the automobile. Because, up-to-now, gasoline was so cheap, nobody bothered to make cars efficient.

• Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle.
• Cars weigh about 20 times more than the passengers.
• A combustion engine gets only 20% efficiency, i.e., it wastes 80% of the energy in the fuel as heat.

When you also consider other classes of transport such as trains, subways, buses and one or two-passenger vehicles, the outlook for higher efficiencies are even better. In contrast, a bicycle weighs about 1/8 of the weight of its rider, and it can get as low as 1/50.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The hottest year on record was 2005. The second hottest year was a tie between 1998 and 2007. The top ten hottest years all occurred since 1990. Oddly, among Republicans, only 49% accept that the earth is warming, down from 62% in a former Pew Poll. To Republicans, global warming has become a religious issue, completely divorced from scientific fact.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs. It takes about 750 megabytes to encode them in a computer. In contrast, a small hard disk for a desktop computer is about 120 gigabytes or 120,000 megabytes or 160 times bigger than required to contain the a human genome. In contrast, the specifications for an Airbus take about 1 terabyte or 1,000,000 megabytes or 1333 times more than the human genome. Yet humans exhibit far more complex behaviours than Airbuses. This means nature is still way ahead of us in the efficiency of its blueprints.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The ice cover of earth is inherently unstable. If the earth gets colder, the ice formed becomes both whiter and more extensive. This in turn increases the albedo (reflectivity) of the earth, making it colder still in a vicious circle. Conversely if the earth warms, from increased CO₂ levels, the ice formed becomes both greyer and less extensive. This in turn decreases the albedo of the earth, making it warmer still in a vicious circle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The lack of cosmic justice is galling when self-centred environmental pigs in their conspicuous consumption status displays (aka Hummers) spew CO₂ greenhouse gas into the air that causes unprecedented droughts in Kenya for people who own nothing but a few goats. The droughts kill all their livestock and plants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The latest science tells us the redline for CO₂ is 350 ppm. That is the maximum level that will sustain life on earth and sustain technological civilisation. We have already hit 390 ppm. The negative effects are delayed. If we are to survive, it is no longer enough to stop putting more CO₂ into the air, we have to start removing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The lawn is the strangest form of agriculture. It consumes huge amounts of labour, fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide and water; yet the weekly crop is discarded at great expense. Its function is conspicuous waste, i.e. status display. This vanity makes humans into ecological morons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The manufacture of cement is the #3 source of CO₂, emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The most amazing thing I ever read was Bernard C. Till’s Masters thesis about nematode worms. He used a computer to simulate the interconnections of the approximately 300 neurons in the worm, including the S-shaped trigger functions in the synapses. What blew me away completely was the simulated worm exhibited all the known behaviours of real worms. He discovered that nature uses a control program for animal behaviour that is encoded incredibly compactly compared with the way computer scientists usually do it. It also means that animals are much less complicated than we suppose.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The sport of choice for suburban men is competitive lawn growing. It is even more environmentally destructive than auto racing. Many men also choose environmental destruction, e.g. poaching and overfishing to demonstrate their masculinity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The tar sands have a carbon footprint 2 to 3 times that of ordinary oil. This is because the separation of the oil from the sand takes so much heat, pressure and chemicals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The time has come to treat the global-warming denying shills who spread FUD about global warming with the same contempt we treat shills for the tobacco companies who insisted smoking is harmless. It should come as no surprise that they are largely the same people, just shilling for new clients.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There are four main reasons to buy organic:

1. To avoid cumulative pesticide residues and accidental pesticide overuse.
2. To protect the environment.
3. For better taste.
4. For better nutrition.

To avoid pesticides, first budget to avoid non-organic meats, milk and eggs, then non-organic thin-skinned fruits and vegetables such as peaches, apples and strawberries, and then if you have money left over, avoid non-organic thick-skinned fruits and vegetables like mangoes, bananas and eggplants. Meat is the worst offender because animals concentrate pesticides from the plants they eat. Farmers have less incentive to spray thick skinned produce since the thick skins naturally protect them from pests. Further, peeling the thick skins removes clinging pesticides.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There are many things in science that boggle the layman’s mind: the immense size of the universe, the fact the universe has a finite size, that you eventually get back to where you started if you head off in a straight line, that space itself expands, quantum mechanics, that time is not universal, that the Grand Canyon was dug by a river, that satellites don’t fall down, the big bang, evolution… That does not make them any less true. There is no law that says the universe has to be simple enough for even a willfully ignorant Southern Baptist high school dropout to understand.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There are three basic responses to global warming:

• The Ostrich

  global warming is a pain in the ass, so, to avoid having to deal with it, they use every means imaginable to convince themselves it is not real.

• The Sloth

  There is no way they are prepared to put out the effort needed to deal with global warming, so they figure they might as well give up now and do nothing at all.

• The Ant

  ‘Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.’ a reference to the 1959 Frank Sinatra song High Hopes.

Which are you?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There is a certain cosmic justice in the bankruptcy of General Motors. People at every level of the economic spectrum who, for economic motives, helped GM pummel the environment with deliberately inefficient automobiles are being punished both severely and economically.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There is a common variety of loon who claims that we should do nothing about global warming because it has natural causes. Leaving alone for a moment the absence of evidence for a natural cause, this woman presumably would refuse to call the fire department if her house were set afire by a natural cause e.g. lightning. She could only permit herself to act if the cause were man-made, e.g. an arsonist.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There is a lack of cosmic justice surrounding global warming. Americans created nearly all the CO₂ causing global warming, but those who pay the penalty are the innocent people of the Seychelles whose island country is disappearing under the waves, the Pakistanis whose low lying country is being flooded out, the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest dying of drought, the reptiles of Australia, and the frogs that have thrived on planet earth since the first animals left the water. Californians, the most ecologically aware Americans, have had to deal with extreme wildfires and of course the impoverished people of Lousiana had to bear the brunt of Katrina. I “spit” at those smug SUV owners and overpowered penismobiles who just don’t give a flying fig about the effect they have on others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There is clash of values between capitalism and environmentalism. Capitalism wants you to consume as much as possible. Environmentalism wants you to consume as little as possible. Capitalism wants you to buy goods primarily to display status. Environmentalism wants you to buy only the goods you need. Capitalism wants you use once and discard. Environmentalism wants you to select durable goods, and to recycle them when they are worn out. Capitalism cares only about this quarter’s profit. Environmentalism is concerned about the whole planet for many generations to come. Despite its apparent might, capitalism is a dead end. It is simply not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Those opposed to going green think of it is something nice to do, politically correct but highly inconvenient and impractical. They still don’t understand it as a matter of survival. We have no choice but to go green even if it were highly inconvenient and nearly impossible to implement (which it is not). Going green is primarily a political problem, not a technical one. Further, the pro-fossil fuel forces fight even exploiting the low-hanging fruit — namely energy efficiency that would give the additional financial benefit of reduced dependence on foreign oil because it would reduce their sales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Those who lobby against getting on with alternative energy and reducing greenhouse emissions on the grounds it might have some minor deleterious effect on the economy are like a child who refuses to run from a tiger because she does not want to spill her ice cream cone. We have absolutely no choice but get on with it, no matter how much it costs. Then again, as W. Edwards Deming noted ‘Survival is not mandatory’
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

To prevent dangerous global warming, we need to get our CO₂ emissions down to 1 tonne (1.10 tons) per person per year. The average North American emits 20 tonnes (22.05 tons) to 30 tonnes (33.07 tons) a year, and stubbornly refuses to cut back even 1%. As W. Edwards Deming put it, ‘You do not have to change: survival is not mandatory.’
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Traditionally, people have had the right to have as many children as they wanted. However, humans are now overflowing the planet. Overpopulation is causing environmental collapse, famine, mass pollution, global warming… Technology now allows 60 year old spinsters to push out babies 8 at a pop, then dying and leaving them for others to raise. Religions still command their adherents to breed to the max. We simply can’t continue as we did.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Warthog populations are down by 80%. Giraffe populations are down by 95%. 1/8 of all bird species are now at risk for extinction. 1/3 of all amphibians are at risk for extinction. 100% of male fish in a section of the Potomac river are producing eggs. They are all intersex as a result of pesticides and plastic softeners that mimic female hormones. The EPA has no regulations on any of these chemicals. They affect humans too. In one town in northern Canada, girls outnumber boys 5 to 1 as a result of the chemicals in the womb feminising or killing off the male fetuses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We are in the middle of a global extinction event, the biggest since the end of the dinosaurs. Where are we headed? Toward a very simple ecology of a few species, a world of algae, dandelions, cockroaches, jelly fish and rats.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We are rapidly wiping out the bees with pesticides. When the bees are gone, the flowering plants that rely on them for pollination will also go extinct. This has happened already in 1980 in Sechuan province in China. The motive is financial. The irony is, once the bees are gone, it will cost the USA $90 billion a year for hand pollination of food crops.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We are unusually inconsistent in that we, as a society, are extremely careful about who adopts a child, even a fetal alcohol syndrome child compared with the way that we allow anyone to create as many children as they please by traditional mating or in vitro fertilisation or, and in some countries, cloning, without requiring the parents to even take a course or get a licence, or prove they can support the children financially. We don’t even insist they refrain from harming the child in the womb with drugs, tobacco or alcohol. We even assist 70 year old women to have children they can’t possibly live to raise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We cull elephants even though there their numbers are rapidly declining, yet the creature in most need of a cull is homo sapiens. There are more humans than there is food, water or resources to support them. Humans are destroying the environment in a scamble for resources. Modern war mainly maims, not kills, so it no longer helps much. Modern medicine has defanged the infectious disease plague. The solution is birth control or sterilisation. We need to pay women not to have babies. We need propaganda to emphasise the downside and common disappointments of having children. We need to make sure that only parents who can emotionally and financially support children are entrusted with their care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We have a choice. We can have clean, renewable energy without pollution or we can burn the last of our legacy of coal and oil bought from dictators who hate us, and put up with the pollution and contend with the unprecedented nightmare of global warming. It would be a no-brainer if it were not for oil and coal companies muddying the issue with disinformation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We have a vicious circle. As the arctic ice melts from global warming, oil companies extract more oil from the arctic. When the oil burns, it releases CO₂ which melts the ice further. The oil companies lobby for this as a Good Thing™™, (short term profit) even though it means megadeaths for the next generation. Not even pea-brained birds or alligators are that casual with the lives of the next generation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We wonder why people of the 1930s were so reluctant to assassinate Hitler. I am fairly certain posterity will similarly condemn our generation for tolerating those who interfere with adopting green energy and reducing green house gases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

What about the oil sands?

1. Extracting the oil releases 3 times as much greenhouse gasses as extracting conventional oil.
2. You need huge amounts of energy to extract the oil. You have a big energy investment with only a marginal return. As the price of oil rises, so does the cost of extracting it.
3. When the consumer burns the oil, it releases unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gases.

Let’s stop dicking around with short-term solutions that destroy the environment, and get on with clean energy, even if it is difficult.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When humans consider allowing sick people to take a new chemical/drug, they test it for many years before accepting it, even when the people who need it will soon die without it, and even when only a few people will ever be exposed to it. However, humans happily pour known toxic chemicals into the environment without any testing, exposing not only all creatures in the environment including humans, but also humans who eat plant and animals from that environment. Only when some wealthy and altruistic soul funds the research to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that trouble detected is 100% caused by one particular chemical dumped into the environment, will humans even consider restricting it. We have our cautions backwards.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When I was born in 1948, spinach contained 158 milligrams of iron per 100 grams. By 1973 it plummeted to 2.2 milligrams. In other words, spinach used to be 72 times as nutritious in 1948. What happened? Factory farming replaces only four minerals: potassium, calcium, nitrogen and phosphates with fertilisers. The trace minerals have long been leached out of the soil by intensive monoculture.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When man goes extinct, the planet will give a gasp of relief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When mercury gets into the water, each level of the food chain concentrates it. The top level (e.g. beluga whales or tuna) is 10,000,000 times more concentrated than in the water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When we emit CO₂, it hangs around in the atmosphere for about 1000 years. There is already too much CO₂ in the air for a tolerable degree of climate change. Even what we have emitted already will continue making the earth hotter and ever hotter for centuries to come. Thus we can’t talk about safe levels of emissions. Even zero is too much. We have to start removing the atmospheric CO₂ that we have already emitted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When you eat soy from Paraguay or meat from cattle fattened on that soy, be aware that there are no environment protection laws there, (or most other third world countries). Agribusiness kills third world children with careless spraying and handling of pesticides. You are effectively hiring them to do that. You are also taking a personal risk since those agribusinesses are equally careless with your life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When you hear controversy about just how endangered a species is, consider that in past, the pessimists were invariably right. How could that be? The optimists are usually biased by a short term financial interest in overharvesting, polluting or habitat destruction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Whenever man invades a new territory, the extinction of most of the large animals soon follows. Man is a full-court-press competitor both for prey and plants. Further he competes for territory by destroying the native vegetation and replacing it with plants particularly suited for human consumption.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Where will the USA be in 20 years if they develop their remaining domestic oil and natural gas reserves now?

• Their oil and gas will be gone.
• They will have done no development of their own on sustainable energy. The Germans and Danes will have sewn up the patents and Americans will have to pay a premium for the technology.
• They won’t have any cheap energy left with which to build the new sustainable energy infrastructure.
• They will have blown their emergency energy reserve.
• They will have made the global warming problem much worse.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Why is man so susceptible to believing nonsense, or pretending to believe nonsense, just because his peers do? Man is a social animal. In times past, if he expressed deviant views he would be outcast from his group. That meant death. Man thus evolved the ability to suppress common sense in favour of group consensus. The key then to dispelling religious superstition is just to let everyone know there is a sizeable number of people to think it is bunk.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Wolves hunt the weakest and sickest individuals in a herd. Humans hunt the strongest and fittest. Wolves act like animal breeders to improve the stock. Humans…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You breathe out about 215.46 kg (475 lbs) of carbon dioxide each year. Just to absorb the CO₂ in your breath, not considering the 20.40 tonnes (22.49 tons) the average American creates by burning fuels, requires 7 trees. To handle all the CO₂ requires 95 trees. We have already leveled over half the planet’s forests, which was suicidal considering we have only a minute fraction of the trees we need.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You can make a powerful yet environmentally friendly glass cleaner. Here is a recipe for a bit over two sprayers full:

water	2 litres (0.53 US gallons)
isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol	240 mls (1.01 US cups)
sudsy ammonia	60 mls (¼ US cups)
Dawn dishwashing liquid	2½ mls (0.51 US teaspoons)
blue food colouring.	1 drop (1 drop)

The blue food colouring is optional; it helps identify the sprayer contents as window cleaner. Use a microfibre cloth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You’d think with all these advances in electronics, a toaster would be smart enough to turn on the elements in only the slots that contain bread.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. You can only mar it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.
~ Theodore Roosevelt (born: 1858-10-27 died: 1919-01-06 at age: 60) 1908-01-11 on the Grand Canyon, 26th president of the USA.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
~ William Ruckelshaus (born: 1932-07-24 age: 77), America’s first head of the EPA, Business Week 1990-06-18

Hell is other people.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre Huis Clos, (No Exit) 1934

The extinction of an animal is an insult to God.
~ Jewish saying

My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.
~ Saudi saying

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
~ Charles Schulz (born: 1922-11-26 died: 2000-02-12 at age: 77) Religion: a Dialogue cartoonist, creator of Peanuts.

The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth.
~ Chief Seattle 1834

Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20% of the world’s annual gross domestic product.
~ Nicholas Stern (born: 1946-04-22 age: 63), economist

Canada, more than any nation, will be affected by rising sea levels from global warming.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

Danish studies of 10,000 birds killed revealed that almost all died in collisions with buildings, cars and wires; only 10 were killed by windmills. Alternative energy sources are absolutely necessary. Global warming will kill birds and bats, as well as other species, in much greater numbers than wind power.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73) Common Ground 2008-12

Each of us now has 2.27 kg (5 lbs) of plastic embedded in our bodies.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

Humans are now the most numerous mammal on the planet. There are more humans than rats or mice. Humans have a huge ecological footprint, magnified by their technology.
Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

In nature there is no such thing as waste. In nature nothing is wasted; everything is recycled.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

The fact of the matter is that today, stuff-selling mega-corporations have a huge influence on our daily lives. And because of the competitive nature of our global economy, these corporations are generally only concerned with one thing — the bottom line. That is, maximising profit, regardless of the social or environmental costs.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73), reported in Discover Magazine.

We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73) on global warming.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
~ Henry David Thoreau (born: 1817-07-12 died: 1862-05-06 at age: 44)

Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us.
~ Henrik Tikkanen (born: 1924-09-09 died: 1984-05-19 at age: 59)

It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.
~ J. R. R. Tolkien (born: 1892-01-03 died: 1973-09-02 at age: 81)

No new major oil field discoveries have been made in decades. Presently, world oil reserves are being depleted three times faster than they are being discovered.… The nation must now start to respond to peaking global oil production to offset the adverse economic and national security impacts.
~ US Department of Energy, Assessment of Strategic Issues 2004-03

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84) on overpopulation.

At this point, 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed — that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating. If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime — by 2048.
~ Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reported at discovery.com Giant jelly fish have already replaced the Japanese fishery.

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.
~ Orville Wright (born: 1871-08-19 died: 1948-10-30 at age: 77) 1908 We see that same conservative pessimism in those crafting today’s computers and computer tools. They are overwhelmed by the details of producing even today’s solutions. You need young, over-confident people who don’t know too much to chart the course ahead. This is especially true of global warming where the current generation has entirely given up hope of a green planet and sustainable human survival.

If every American consumer brought their own reusable bags when shopping, we’ll cut more than 453.59 tonnes (500 tons) of CO₂ this month — that’s the equivalent of taking 1,300,000 cars off the road!
~ Rebecca Young, care2.org

The most significant trend in the US industry has been the decline in the amount of energy recovered compared to energy expended. In 1916, the ratio was about 28 to 1, a very handsome energy return. By 1985, the ratio had dropped to 2 to 1, and it is still dropping.
~ Walter Youngquist , Professor of Geology, University of Oregon Beyond Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals page 183, 1997

By 2003, it had dropped to 0.5 to 1 in the US, making oil extraction no longer economically viable, no matter how high the price of crude. The catch is as the price of crude rises so does the price of the energy to extract it, and in the same ratio.

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