...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.
James HansenRead
If your child gets asthma, the fossil fuel industry doesn't pay. Or if there's a natural disaster, the bill is paid by the taxpayer, not the fossil fuel company.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fossil fuel companies do not bear the costs of the environmental damage they cause, which affects society and taxpayers instead.
James Hansen's quote highlights the disconnect between the fossil fuel industry's contributions to environmental harm and the responsibility for the consequences of that harm. When children suffer from asthma or communities face natural disasters due to climate change, it is the taxpayers who ultimately bear these costs, not the corporations responsible for creating the pollution and climate risk.
Themes
Fossil FuelsAsthmaTaxpayerNatural DisasterEnvironmentPollution
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on climate change at a school, you can use this quote to illustrate the broader societal impacts of fossil fuel pollution.
More from James Hansen
All quotes βWe need to send a message to Congress and the president that we want them to take the actions that are needed to preserve climate for young people and future generations and all life on the planet.
James HansenRead
Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.
James HansenRead
Rising carbon price is essential to 'decarbonize' the economy - to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels.
James HansenRead
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
James HansenRead
'Goals' and 'caps' on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.
James HansenRead
Similar quotes
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
Kip ThorneRead
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.
Neil ArmstrongRead
I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons - and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.
Hans BetheRead
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles DarwinRead
If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
Niels BohrRead
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
Richard DawkinsRead