Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
Interpretation
The quote compares climate change denial to Holocaust denial, emphasizing the irrationality and unacceptability of denying well-established truths.
George Monbiot's quote highlights the absurdity of denying climate change by equating it with the denial of the Holocaust, an atrocity that is universally recognized as a horrific fact of history. This parallel serves to criticize those who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, suggesting that such denial is not only misguided but morally reprehensible, thereby calling for a greater awareness and action regarding environmental issues.
In practice
In a debate about environmental policy, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of acknowledging climate change.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
It's an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed but ... most people just don't get it - I must be a very bad explainer
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.
No particular theory may ever be regarded as absolutely certain.... No scientific theory is sacrosanct.
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