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.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
When I test I never go right to the limit. Only because when you are below the limit you can go at the same speed all day, and that's the only way you can be absolutely sure about what you are testing.
By venturing into space, we improve life for everyone here on Earth - scientific advances and innovations that come from this kind of research create products we use in our daily lives.
Very many maintain that all we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.
If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.
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