Jeff Goodell Quotes

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

Mark Ruffalo, aka the Incredible Hulk, is the natural gas industry's worst nightmare: a serious, committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.

If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for "dangerous" climate change.

For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.

If we drill the hell out of everything, including protected public lands and fragile regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America can emerge as an 'energy superpower.'

In reality, Republicans have long been at war with clean energy. They have ridiculed investments in solar and wind power, bashed energy-efficiency standards, attacked state moves to promote renewable energy and championed laws that would enshrine taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels while stripping them from wind and solar.

Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry - the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall.

Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.

Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.

Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline.

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

In the United States, we do a pretty good job of protecting iconic landscapes and postcard views, but the ocean gets no respect.

One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America's energy problems never give up.

Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.

Without electrons, there is no Google. And without clean electrons, there will be no Google customers, since we'll all be too busy fleeing from rising seas, droughts, and disease.

In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.

If you think Wall Street firms have it good, you haven't looked closely at Big Oil.

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

The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry?

The first sign of whether Obama is serious about confronting the climate crisis will be revealed by how he organizes the White House.

Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.

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.

In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.

Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?

Bloomberg's $50 million is not going to revolutionize the electric power industry. But his willingness to fight is already inspiring others to see Big Coal differently.

Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.

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

Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.

Is it in our national interest to overheat the planet? That's the question Obama faces in deciding whether to approve Keystone XL, a 2,000-mile-long pipeline that will bring 500,000 barrels of tar-sand oil from Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Climate scientists have long pointed to the Southwest as one of the places in the U.S. that is most vulnerable to global warming impacts, especially drought. And if there's one thing that even climate denialists don't dispute, dry things burn.

In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.

The natural gas industry has worked long and hard to smear Josh Fox, the director of 'Gasland,' and has failed.

The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.

When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good - it just needs to be clean energy.

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.

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

You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 - more than twice earlier projections.

Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn't mean they're stupid.

Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change.

Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.

But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.

Once we start deliberately messing with the climate systems, we could inadvertently shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that rainfall in the Amazon might be particularly vulnerable), causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine, and more.

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.

When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.

The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.

With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations.

It may be too late for West Virginia to save itself from the ravages of Big Coal. But it's not too late for America.

Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.

One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.

Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.

Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.

Nobody disputes that cheap natural gas would be a good thing for the economy. The question is, is this a sustainable new development that can be counted on for decades to come, or simply a 'bubble' brought on by a land grab and drilling frenzy?

Americans don't pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren't sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn't get anybody's pulse racing.

Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he's already shifting the debate over climate change.