Geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate to offset global warming – is a nightmare fix for climate change. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them. – Jeff Goodell
In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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? – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
The first sign of whether Obama is serious about confronting the climate crisis will be revealed by how he organizes the White House. – Jeff Goodell
With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. – Jeff Goodell
To understand how quickly we’re cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites. – Jeff Goodell
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. – Jeff Goodell
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.’ – Jeff Goodell
