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?
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
Often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, "But of course, this is what it is" and got an important result.
Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.
Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
What works most effectively for quelling disease outbreaks like Ebola is not quarantining huge populations. What works is focusing on and isolating the sick and those in direct contact with them as they are at highest risk of infection. This strategy worked with SARS, and it worked during the H1N1 flu pandemic.
Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.
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