Naomi Klein Quotes

When I am president of the United States of America, there will never be any cap-and-trade in the United States.

It's not all Obama's fault: His plans to rebuild America's energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.

Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.

Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.

Obama's record on climate issues is not all bad.

The first sign of whether Obama is serious about confronting the climate crisis will be revealed by how he organizes the White House.

I attended the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, and back then, national governments waited until days before to submit climate plans, and the U.S. based its pledge on a proposed bill that would fail in the Senate.

Cuts in carbon emissions would mean significantly higher electricity prices. We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama's EPA.

Washington agencies are now trying a backdoor approach to regulate our climate by abusing existing laws.

As a former EPA administrator under a Republican president, I recognize that it is easy to hate regulations in general. After all, regulatory action causes people to spend money or change behavior, often to solve problems they do not believe exist.

I hope the EPA will listen to the many votes over the years in Congress opposing cap-and-trade and rescind that proposed rule.

Climate change is not an excuse for the EPA to ignore the bounds of law and issue illegal regulations that will cost jobs, shutter industries, and have little to no positive impact on the environment.

It appears that President Obama is making great progress on climate change, he is changing the political climate in the country back to Republican.

Look, I'm a huge supporter of Obama's - he's the first president I ever donated money to. But I think in terms of climate change and the environment, he's been, at best, disappointing.

Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution - water pollution and other types of pollution - from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

Obama sounded like Al Gore on global warming. The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his stimulus bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering.

Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country.

Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.

Climate change was a point of division between Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney. The president declared climate change a global threat, acknowledged that the actions of humanity were deepening the crisis, and pledged to do something about it if elected.

When I was in Minnesota serving in the state Senate and in Washington, D.C., I did everything I could to defeat cap and trade. I didn't work to implement cap and trade.

To put that into some perspective, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had first taken the idea of the Kyoto Protocol up to the Congress, the United States Senate voted it down 95 to nothing.

As soon as cap and trade was presented as a bipartisan compromise, many conservatives who originally supported the idea, turned against it ... Thus have fossil fuel companies and their ideological allies paralyzed the policymaking process both at the global level and in the United States.

I happen to think the Paris accord, the Paris treaty, or the Paris Agreement, if you will, should have been treated as a treaty, should have gone through Senate confirmation.