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How are we going to know what impact that has on the greenhouse gas emissions? How are we going to hold everybody accountable for doing their part?
Sep 10, 2025
If we don't start with rapid emissions reductions and substantial emissions reductions, then we will pass a danger point, beyond which the consequences for many people and countries on Earth will simply become unacceptable and eventually disastrous.
I'm totally in favour of meeting our Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But I don't think we should do that by making ourselves uncompetitive.
I believe that we're all connected to each other with an invisible spiritual thread through which we can transmit energy emissions and positive thinking. I want you to use your visualization techniques.
The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.
The hydrogen powered car, with its high fuel mileage and zero emission rate, is just one example of the products under development that will help increase our energy independence.
Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.
Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world.
The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable...There is no way I can see to stop this rise, even if we have gone to zero emissions.
Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.
On some issues, I'm a staunch Conservative — like curtailing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can Conserve the environment.
At the moment, every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible. This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide. We dont want a global suicide pact. We want a global survival pact
The climate system is constantly readjusting naturally in a large way - more than we would ever see from CO2. The CO2 kick [impact of CO2 emissions] is extremely small compared to what is happening in a natural way. Within the framework of a proper study of the sun-climate connection, you don't need CO2 to explain anything.
It is common sense that when women are able to plan their pregnancies, populations grow more slowly and as a result so do greenhouse gas emissions. Providing access to contraception and preventative health should be one of the many effective strategies used to fight climate change.
The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. ... We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe - and would benefit the vast majority - are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.
Both rich and poor nations have a common stake in policies that put the globe on a sustainable development path. The conflict is less between poor and rich countries than between the broad interests of people and the narrow interests of extractive industries. We need to find our way towards some kind of global regime that reduces emissions of the greenhouse gases, but well-off nations need to transfer the technology to make this possible, rather than viewing this shift as one more opportunity for private industry to profit.
First, we must stop wasting energy. A quarter of the UK's carbon emissions come from the home. Our housing stock - the oldest in Europe - is costing us the earth... After transport, heating is the second biggest driver of energy demand in Britain. British Gas research suggests that householders who put in energy efficiency measures cut their gas consumption by 44%. Better insulated buildings will do much of the work for us.
In a sense the U.S. is climate illiterate. If you look at global polls about what the public knows about climate change even in Brazil, China you have more people who know about the problem and think deep cuts in emission are needed.
We face the gravest threat that civilization has ever confronted. It's global in nature and requires a global solution. Increased CO2 emissions anywhere, whether from China or the United States or from one of the countries that is burning its forests like Brazil or Indonesia.
Today, natural gas now outstrips coal as the leading provider of electricity in America. If this is as big as people believe it is, natural gas will soon be powering trucks and marine ships. Maybe even standard commercial cars that people use at home through compressed natural gas, other gas to liquids. The potential is there for more energy independence by America and a reliance on cleaner fuel - natural gas emits half as much as coal, in terms of carbon emissions. That's a real bounty.
If Margaret Thatcher took climate change seriously and believed that we should take action to reduce global greenhouse emissions, then taking action and supporting and accepting the science can hardly be the mark of incipient Bolshevism.
With this information, in light of the increasing human demands on vegetation, it is my personal opinion that capping CO2 emissions or reducing them to some prior level would be akin to 'biting the hand that feeds us.
Well, I'm not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.
Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions.
Politicians all over the world cater to domestic vote banks. They will spend only on what their constituents want. So unless there is a grass root green movement in a nation the politicians will not be willing to spend money on curbing emissions. More awareness is needed amongst the people to effect the real change in how governments spend.
To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.
We can debate this or that aspect of climate change, but the reality is that most people now accept our climate is indeed subject to change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.
Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.
You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach.
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
Vehicle emissions standards directly sparked the development and application of a wide range of automotive technologies that are now found throughout the global automobile market.
I have advocated an entirely different approach than cap and tax, which would be worldwide in application and which emphasizes technology as a way of reducing total emissions.
The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.
In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment. ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed.
I honestly don't know, but if America continues to refuse to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, I see a bleak future not only for American society, but for the world as a whole. This is a global problem that is not going away, and the United States is an obstacle to solving it.
If we dont continue to pursue alternative, emissions-free energy sources like nuclear fuel, we are at risk of increasing our dependence on costly natural gas.
The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle.
Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium.
There would be a cost for dumping carbon into our atmosphere and a cap on total emissions. The government must make a clear and firm decision - terminating the idea in our society it is free to pump infinite amounts of carbon into the air. Once that happens, private capital will flow even more aggressively into developing and deploying the alternative, less-polluting technologies.
Does it make more sense to provide air conditioning or to limit CO2 emissions. I vote for more air conditioning in these susceptible regions.
But who knows, some years from now if there's a global emissions trading scheme agreement, as many have hoped for, then I'm sure Australia would be part of it.
Joschka Fischer was a Green Party politician and Germany's foreign minister. We hired Mr. Fischer, as well as former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as advisors because we, as an automaker, want to know, for example, how new emissions laws will develop in the United States, Europe and Asia. Fischer and Ms. Albright have diverse contacts worldwide. They can call our attention to trends early on, information from which we can benefit.
CAFE standards have little impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and the environmental benefits of increasing CAFE standards are frequently overstated. Their impact on human health is more certain: CAFE standards have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths since their adoption.
I think we need to address greenhouse gas emissions. But I try to get involved in issues where I see a legislative result... So I just leave the issue alone because I don't see a way through it, and there are certain fundamentals, for example nuke power, that people on the left will never agree with me on. So why should I waste my time when I know the people on the left are going to reject nuclear power?
That's why we call for a New Deal prototype. Which means we are creating the jobs - nationally funded program but locally controlled - with guidelines to achieve 100% clean renewable energy through wind, water and sun by 2030. Also to create a sustainable food system, since this is a major portion of climate emissions, and also calling for public transportation as well as infrastructure restoration including in that ecosystem restoration.
It's important to see things in perspective. Automobile traffic is responsible for only 12 percent of total CO2 emissions. One should be able to point this out without being accused of changing the subject.
India was a late comer to industrialization, and as such, we have contributed very little to the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. But we are determined to be part of the solution to the problem.
The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.
In a perfect world global emissions would have peaked already. In a semi-perfect world we will peak on Dec. 31, 2020. The fact is, that's going to be difficult. We know that it's going to get more and more expensive the longer we delay.