Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
Interpretation
The fossil-fuel industry is not charged for releasing carbon dioxide, a major environmental pollutant.
Bill McKibben highlights an important issue regarding the fossil-fuel industry, emphasizing that it is uniquely permitted to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without incurring any costs. This lack of accountability signifies a significant gap in environmental regulation and poses serious consequences for the climate and public health, as carbon dioxide is a leading contributor to global warming and environmental degradation.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about climate change policy at a conference on environmental law.
The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.
Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one; it's the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.
You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.
No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.
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