Environmental Policy Quotes

But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy ... One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more. ~ Ottmar Edenhofer

I believe in a sound, strong environmental policy that protects the health of our people and a wise stewardship of our nation's natural resources. ~ Ronald Reagan

It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies. ~ Noreena Hertz

We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. ~ Tim Wirth

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore ... ~ Ottmar Edenhofer

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an achievement that much of the Republican Party has been trying to undo over the past several decades. Richard Nixon signed into law four landmark federal bills: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, and made many strong environmental appointments in his administration. As we saw in Section 2.2, it was when the Reagan administration came to power in 1980 that environmental concern began to become a partisan issue. ~ Dale Jamieson

This Bush administration has a growing credibility gap, maybe even a credibility chasm, on environmental policy. The President has lost the trust of the American people when it comes to the environment. ~ Jim Jeffords

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs. ~ Jim Clyburn

We know taxes slow down economic growth, so if you add a carbon tax you have to also minus other taxes. You can't take more money out of people's pockets. I don't think you can build a consensus in this country about environmental policy if you're going to make people poor. ~ Christy Clark

The strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy. ~ William Nordhaus

Good environmental policy is good economic policy. ~ Bernie Sanders

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country. ~ Jay Inslee

Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there. ~ David James Duncan

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes. ~ Jay Inslee

Given the large uncertainties at each major step of the case for reliance on a carbon tax, economists should reconsider their current support for such a policy. ~ Robert P. Murphy

On what reasonable grounds would sincere, informed environmentalists refuse to join animal advocates in a campaign to protect increasingly threatened fish populations from the snapping teeth of humanity? ~ Lisa Kemmerer

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Electric vehicles won't displace ICE vehicles because they save money (except in the commercial realm), or even because of their very real environmental benefits. They will win out in the end because they're better. They're more fun and more convenient to drive, they're safer, they require less maintenance, they offer more interior space, and their technological superiority enables all kinds of high-tech features that will someday seem as necessary as the AC and the stereo do today. ~ Charles Morris

Personal abuse is no substitute for policy. It signals panic. ~ Margaret Thatcher

We find ourselves facing a rising tide of biologically active, synthetic organic chemicals. Some tinker with our hormones. Some attach themselves to our chromosomes and trigger mutations. Some cripple the immune system. Some light up our genes and so enhance the production of certain enzymes. If we could metabolize these chemicals into completely benign breakdown products and excrete them, they would pose less of a hazard. Instead, a good many of them accumulate. ~ Sandra Steingraber

In trying to explain this linkage, I was inspired by a traditional African tool that has three legs and a basin to sit on. To me the three legs represent three critical pillars of just and stable societies. The first leg stands for democratic space, where rights are respected, whether they are human rights, women's rights, children's rights, or environmental rights. The second represents sustainable and equitable management and resources. And the third stands for cultures of peace that are deliberately cultivated within communities and nations. The basin, or seat, represents society and its prospects for development. Unless all three legs are in place, supporting the seat, no society can thrive. Neither can its citizens develop their skills and creativity. When one leg is missing, the seat is unstable; when two legs are missing, it is impossible to keep any state alive; and when no legs are available, the state is as good as a failed state. No development can take place in such a state either. Instead, conflict ensues. ~ Wangari Maathai

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size.
Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase.
Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water. ~ Clive Cussler

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now. ~ Gregg Easterbrook

The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating. ~ William H. Stewart

Effective foreign policy has always involved the use of both sticks and carrots, and finding the right balance between the two is more art than science. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

It was inspiring to learn of the new Bachelor of Environmental Studies Program, and I congratulate you for it. Singapore is geographically in the right central position for an influence in Asia and Australia, and NUS has the reputation and academic strength to make it effective. ~ E. O. Wilson

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road. ~ Lars Peter Hansen

Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. Recall ~ J.D. Vance

Women learned one important lesson
namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement ... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

So i say, change the base! If you change the base, anybody will be as tall as anybody else! My belief is poverty is not caused by poor ppl. Poverty is caused by the system. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue. ~ Muhammad Yunus

If I become president, France will not continue with the same policies as under Nicolas Sarkozy - both in domestic policy and in foreign and European policy. ~ Francois Hollande

I'd rather deal with a big company, because at least I can sue them, and see them, and know what they're doing. Google, for instance, shows you everything they've collected on you, with a clearly written privacy policy. They tell you what they're doing with it. I'm not scared by that. ~ Robert Scoble

The word infrastructure means nothing to the majority of people of America. We have to come up with a sexier word than infrastructure. So the key thing is that you have to go out and promote and market this the right way like with everything in policy. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

The timing of this sudden interest in the plight of Iraqi women cannot be overemphasized. For decades, many Iraqi women activists in the US and UK had tried to raise awareness about the systematic abuse of human and women's rights under Saddam Hussein, the atrocities linked to the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and the impact of economic sanctions on women and families ... 'We wrote so many letters and we organized many events ... They did not want to know. They were just not interested. It was only in the run-up to the [2003] invasion that the governments started to care about the suffering of Iraqi women. ~ Nadje Al-Ali

After the revolution of 1979, Iran embarked on a policy of sectarianism. Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors, a policy of assassinating diplomats and of attacking embassies. Iran is responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in the Kingdom, it is responsible for smuggling explosives and drugs into Saudi Arabia. And Iran is responsible for setting up sectarian militias in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, whose objective is to destabilize those countries. ~ Adel Al-Jubeir

Many people who live in big countries like ours thought that we had resources that would work for us for many, many years, but that was a mistake. Our natural wealth corrupted us. In this country, you were among the first to raise environmental issues. In Russia, despite all of its problems today, people are concerned about the environment, and it's become a central issue on the agenda. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...

McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans' long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman's 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies ~ David Halberstam

How, then, has Obama been saddled with an image of being long on inspiration and short on details? The answer is that journalists are not accustomed to covering a candidate who moves crowds the way Obama does, who uses speech cadences and rhythm like Martin Luther King Jr. without making his talk explicitly about race. Sen. Clinton already owned the policy-wonk slot, so by default, Obama was cast as the poetic one. ~ Howard Kurtz

For the most part, congressional Republicans represent people who are whiter, older and richer than most Americans, and our creaky old political system gives those Americans disproportionate influence over public policy. ~ Alex Pareene

It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went. ~ Henry David Thoreau

No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can't worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half ~ Michael Crichton

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not. ~ Dean Inge

Unfortunately, psychologists know much less about how the environment influences a person's personality than is commonly assumed. People often talk as if the environmental effects had been well understood for decades, and the new discovery was that there were genetic effects too. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The area of environmental influences on personality is a morass of unsupported or poorly tested ideas, and, ironically, it is behaviour geneticists who have brought the most progress to the field. The irony is that behaviour genetics was founded in order to discover heritable influences on human behaviour. The methods such studies use, however, also allow us to identify non-genetic influences, and say quite a lot about them. ~ Daniel Nettle

When I realized that my body had been damaged from adverse environmental exposures, I decided to use it for medical research and to develop the recovery techniques. ~ Steven Magee

But science should be based in fact, not fashion. And policy should be based on science. Facts shouldn't change. And indeed, they don't. But their interpretation does. Consider the idea that inflammation causes heart disease. First espoused in the late 1800s after the invention of aspirin by Bayer, this idea was relegated to the dustbin of medical science in favor of the cholesterol hypothesis, which reigned for the second half of the twentieth century. But over the last decade, the "inflammation hypothesis" has made a decided comeback, and is now thought to be the primary factor in the genesis of atherosclerotic plaques and thrombosis. ~ John Yudkin

We thank those Senators, both Republican and Democrat, who stood firm against tremendous pressure from the Bush administration, pro-drilling members of Congress and their allies in the oil industry. They recognize that the budget is an inappropriate place to decide controversial national policy matters like America's energy policy. We urge all members of Congress to remain steadfast in their belief that the vast, unspoiled wilderness of America?s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is more than a line item in the Federal Budget. ~ Carl Pope

I think that the environmental movement is wisely moving away from a largely emotion-based argument for the spiritual or intrinsic value of Nature with a capital "N" and evolving toward a very hard-nosed case for the economic value of natural capital, ecosystem services, biodiversity, etc. ~ Edward Norton

Defense, national security, and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of the Russian budget, more than double the share in 2010. That dwarfs the 18 percent spent by the U.S. last year on defense and national security, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. ~ Anonymous

George Soros finances liberal immigration policy throughout the Western world and also funds Noel Ignatiev and his "Race Traitor" website dedicated to the abolition of the white race. So ~ Kevin Macdonald

You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn't work. And what's good theater and what's good politics isn't necessarily good economic policy. ~ Michael Bloomberg

When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere. ~ Calvin Trillin

After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms. ~ Barry Commoner

Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all. ~ Richard Engel

Any such unnatural union as the mingling of an exclusive system, such as homeopathy, with scientific medicine in a school, ... (will) render every school adopting such a policy unworthy of support of the profession. ~ Harris L Coulter

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit. ~ Jim Hightower

It is no exaggeration to say that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of foreign policy - it is a matter for British domestic security policy too,. ~ John Denham

Injection of environmental and political perspectives in midstream of the science discussion cannot help the process of inquiry. I believe that persons with relevant scientific expertise should concentrate, with pride, on cool objective analysis, providing information to the public and decision-makers when it is found, but leaving the moral implications for later common consideration, or at most for summary inferential discussion. ~ James Hansen

It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it. ~ David R. Brower