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Climate Change Quotes
Page 59
“Climate change poses a significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”
– 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, United States Department of Defense
“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
– Henry David Thoreau
“In this case, the goal is even greater, for it is a matter of survival. Human civilization and survival may well be the context for moving forward as it trumps politics, religion, economics, policy, and nationalism.”
– This Spaceship Earth Houle and Rumage
“The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.”
– President Theodore Roosevelt
“The current approach to resolving climate change is to focus on the reduction of CO2 emissions. It is an understandable, yet insufficient approach. There is a lesson from childhood that applies to this topic, but it is a tough lesson to learn. The lesson is, being less bad is not the same as being good.”
– This Spaceship Earth Houle and Rumage
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
– Albert Einstein
“Climate change challenges our basic belief structure. Do we have dominion over the earth and creation, or is our role one of stewardship? I thought we were supposed to leave a place better than we found it.”
– Tim Rumage, co-founder of This Spaceship Earth
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
– Horace Mann
“The issue we have today is the predominance of all the twentieth-century physical constructs that dominate the world. We can’t simply start anew with new structures, transportation systems, and cities, leaving what exists behind. We don’t have a blank canvas on which to paint a new picture. Creation of the new has to be infused back into the old. We must develop the vision of the twenty-first century, then turn and face the landscape dealt us by the twentieth-century and retrofit it.”
– David Houle from “Entering the Shift Age” (2013)
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain
