Paul Krugman Quotes

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

If we fail to act, we will end up with a different planet.

If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.

It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.

I don't see this planet being... they're talking about how they're turning around the environmental problems here, but I think it's already too late.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

When the last tree is felled, Christ will return to the Earth.

Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?

I think Australia is pretty much living the last day on Earth in a lot of ways.

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.

Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves.

The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.

The fate of the living planet is the most important issue facing mankind.

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

Our situation, with global warming and air quality and all of that, has gotten to be catastrophic.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis - a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?