environmental urgency Quotes

It may be a hundred-year battle to turn around our industries and finally get everyone living on sustainable energy with technology that can keep our lives comfortable. If that's the case, the first 20 years of the shift have actually done a lot to support that. But there's still a long way to go, and judging by the state of the environment, we don't have that kind of time.

Very urgent measures need to be taken, and without much delay, in dealing with the ongoing destruction of the environment.

The climate is not tomorrow. The climate is a year off or maybe 10 years off. So we have to be really clear that we're solving the crisis of economic insecurity at the same time.

I think the climate is too important to say we are going to wait until all our economic woes are over before we act effectively.

Carbon dioxide pollution is transforming the chemistry of the ocean, rapidly making the water more acidic. In decades, rising ocean acidity may challenge life on a scale that has not occurred for tens of millions of years. So we confront an urgent choice: to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds.

Water is on the table for every single one us. When it's gone, game over. I don't care what company you run; I don't care if you're Republican or liberal.

The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change.

A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.

There is no Plan B becasue there is no Planet B.

I am now certain that we have no alternative but to reduce urgently the levels of carbon that we are still pumping into the atmosphere as though tomorrow simply didn't matter. If we don't act collectively and individually, our children and their children will reap a whirlwind which will obliterate their civilisation.

Development requires modification and transformation of the environment... the planet's capacity to support its people us being irreversibly reduced by the destruction and degradation of the biosphere and the need to understand the problem and take corrective action is becoming urgent.

The Earth cannot wait 60 years. I want a future for my children and my children's children. The clock is ticking.

Dangerous climate change... It's important not to be alarmist but it is very important to be alarmed

Global warming is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and compounded effect that may be irreversible! We do not have eons or centuries or many decades. Most of us alive today may not even have the luxury of saying 'Après moi, le déluge' because we will be around to experience it ourselves. And if you think it will be 'interesting' or 'exciting,' ask the tsunami survivors if that's how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate' may take all of us down, once and forever.

There are nations that resist, voices that attempt to diminish the urgency or dismiss the science, or declare, either in word or indifference, that this is not our problem to solve. Well, let me tell you, it is our problem to solve... To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say this: There is such a thing as a global conscience.

When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.

I don't want to wait 20 or 50 years for something to be done about petrochemical pollution.

Global warming is the foreboding thunder in the distance. Ocean acidification is the lightning strike in our front yard, right here, right now.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate but we are wasting precious time.

Scientists are telling us that 350 parts per million [of carbon] in the atmosphere is the upper limit. We're at 387 parts per million now, and we're up in that zone where the risk of going past irrevocable tipping points is elevated. It's no different than going to a doctor and learning your cholesterol is too high, and you're at risk for a heart attack. You have to work to lower your cholesterol and hope to get there before the heart attack comes.

In the past we could afford a long gestation period before undertaking major environmental policy initiatives. Today the time for a well-planned transition to a sustainable system is running out. We may be moving in the right direction, but we are moving too slowly. We are failing in our responsibility to future generations and even the present one.

This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

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.