Josh Fox Quotes

Water is a cure-all. Water is everything. You can't get better without drinking lots of water, and you can't drink water unless it's clean.

I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is.

I think what we all have to do is make this big leap towards renewables. And it has to be a solution where you're actually building the answer; and it has to be built faster than the natural gas industry can build their answer.

Natural gas is a bridge fuel. But it's not a bridge - it's a gangplank. It's either a bridge in space or a bridge in time. The bridge in time we don't need. We have renewable technology right now.

It's remarkable to watch the president, with all the weight of his ability to command rhetoric with the bully pulpit behind him, make a clear speech about climate change and why that's so important for us all to focus on. And that is a rather remarkable thing to see. It's enormously powerful.

You know, there's a difference between politicians and leaders. Politicians read poll numbers and compromise. Leaders do what's morally right.

We have to start processing what we're really made of in America. American character is not dead. American integrity and honesty are not dead. When we're backed up against the wall against the largest corporations in the history of corporations, it's there.

People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set.

In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.

The Safe Drinking Water Act, the safety provisions of the Clean Water Acts, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund Law - the gas industry is exempt from all these basic environmental and worker protections. They don't have to disclose the chemicals they use. They don't have to play by the same rules as anybody else.

I really hate to be Debbie Downer right now, because everyone would love to say, "Yeah, we're finally doing something on climate!"

For those people who are going to tune in strictly for the pyrotechnics, we have better and bigger explosions. That's a prerequisite of any sequel. But in terms of this, what we're really monitoring is watching the gas industry light our institutions, light our regulatory agencies, light our democracy on fire.

Every single dollar spent lobbying a legislator on behalf of oil and gas is a toxic dollar that undermines public health and safety laws that protect Americans. That's contamination of the political system.

Natural gas is a dirty fossil fuel like the rest of them.

Watching a film should feel like you just tore a hole out of the air and the void caught fire.

They're a lot of great scientists and their mission is to protect people. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, but it's really a people protection agency. And they're out there trying to do their job and do the science.

First of all, the idea that natural gas is better than coal is a lie, especially when it comes to fracking for natural gas. It is a lie that was bought into by a lot of Democrats and a lot of environmentalists because I think they wanted to have a win against something; against coal.

I have to have faith that we're going to succeed in transforming where we get our energy from. The big worry is whether or not we're going to do it before it's too late. And I think nobody knows the answer to that.

The aquifer [is] the water table people need to keep secure. Nature has this incredible system of water purification under the ground. Ground water is much better to drink than surface water because it filters out the bacteria that can cause all sorts of problems.

There are regulations all over the spectrum that have to be done to the existing situation right now. But the only policy that makes sense is a nationwide moratorium: no new fracking, no new fracked wells.

Sometimes I feel like there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make Environmental Protection Agency people feel better about their jobs. They're going out there, they're trying to protect Americans and then time and time and time again they get their knees cut off at the policy level.

When you live in a watershed area, in a pristine area, and you could watch this whole place fall apart in front of your eyes, you don't sell your soul for a buck.

When you can light your water on fire due to methane contamination in your ground water, what else can you do but laugh?

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

When you frack a well, you're exploding methane up into the atmosphere. So, Barack Obama, by supporting natural gas, and also talking about climate change is literally burning his own inaugural address. And he's doing it with natural gas.

The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.

In a couple of decades you have half of the wells that are drilled right now, and you're talking about numbers in the millions of wells drilled, leaking. That's a huge crisis in terms of water contamination. There's no way to fix that problem.

It is an incredibly hopeful experience watching communities come together and actually reassemble democracy. The democracy's been taken away from us. But they're reinventing democracy out there in rural Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh.

I think that the world is in the middle of a huge transition that we have to make to renewable energy. We have to transition away from fossil fuels very, very quickly.

It's the next phase of authorship of this country's energy future. It's gonna come from the people. It's not gonna be deus ex machina or Obama ex machina, or science ex machina. It's gonna be the people. It's not going to be a wind energy company that comes in and saves the day. It's going to be the people who figure this out.

There's something really happening and really moving, and it's exciting and it makes me very optimistic because it is going to be the engine for how we really combat climate change. Which is strong communities.

I love documentary because it's alive.

History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.

We need policy change, and the most important thing people can do is to contribute and participate in the political process. We have to vote climate change deniers and people who will create subsidies for the fossil fuel industry out of office. We have to protest when bad decisions are being made about fracking or tar sands.

'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.

According to the oil and gas industry and their proponents, I am a communist, terrorist, Nazi, Russian-sympathizing, anti-American, arsonist, extremist.

I think we're in an era of unprecedented dominance by corporations. I think people understand that deeply; I don't think that's even questioned.

I'm a theater guy and a filmmaker. So when my community was thrown up in the air by the gas industry, the way I could contribute was to do something in the film world. I never thought it would be a big deal at all.

The problem is that everywhere the gas drilling industry goes, a trail of water contamination, air pollution, health concerns and betrayal of basic American civic and community values follows.