115 Quotes by Jeff Goodell

You gotta love Rick Perry’s swagger. The Texas Governor is out there in the Iowa cornfields, unabashedly going to toe-to-toe with President Obama, doing his best to instantly cast himself as the big dog in the Republican pack.

It’s not all Obama’s fault: His plans to rebuild America’s energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.

Obama’s record on climate issues is not all bad.

Coal boosters like to tout coal as cheap and plentiful – well, not anymore. At least not in China.

The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.

Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.

When I asked the mayor if flood insurance rates had gone up after Sandy, he said, “Not really.” This is how disaster relief works in America. There are lots of incentives to rebuild but few incentives to rebuild differently, much less to rethink the long-term future of cities and towns along the coast.

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.