Quotes about Environment

The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

The reason the world emits so much greenhouse gas is that—as long as you ignore the long-term damage they do—our current energy technologies are by and large the cheapest ones available. So moving our immense energy economy from "dirty," carbon-emitting technologies to ones with zero emissions will cost something.

fission, carbon capture and sequestration, offshore wind, cellulosic ethanol (a type of advanced biofuel), and meat alternatives.

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

Because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There's no getting around physics.

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you'll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It's one of the main reasons why the country is the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

We already know the emissions number; it's 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn't been firmly established, but it's at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that's the number I'll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year

Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

Extra heat won't be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.

seas getting warmer, they're also bifurcating—developing some places where the water has more oxygen and others where it has less oxygen.