William H. Calvin Quotes.
Carrying on as usual carries enormous risks, condemning today’s students to a world of constant insecurity and frequent catastrophes.
Countries that innovate first get the new jobs, developing an economic edge over the C-free laggards that end up having to later import the technology.
Climate change has a very high procrastination penalty that just grows with each passing year of inaction – rather like what happens if you don’t pay off your credit card. But for climate, there is no such thing as a fresh start from bankruptcy.
Trusting your energy policy to the fossil fuel lobby is like trusting your health care system to the tobacco lobby.
Since Serengeti-scale savanna scenes are only one or two million years old, our earliest after-the-apes ancestors didn’t move into this scene so much as they evolved with it, as the slower climate changes and uplift produced more grass and less forest.
Carbon-free energy is simply something we have to do. The time for talk is past. If we turn around net carbon emissions by 2020 rather than 2040, we get another 2В° of fever rather than 3В° – and that’s a big difference.
Our CO2 mixes with everyone else’s within a year, then hangs around for centuries like a shroud.
Stopping emissions growth represents the most minimal of do-something responses.
It’s going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.
Even if we stop the growth, we’d still be adding a constant amount of fossil carbon to the atmosphere each year.
If we don’t start thinking big about the CO2 problem, we may miss our opportunity to stop a climate runaway that will trash the habitable parts of the earth.
