Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Quotes

Coal is our country’s dirtiest energy source, from mining to burning to disposing of coal waste…. Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology…. Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.

Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.

Every breath we take as human beings damages the planet.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.

Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.

[Coal is] a 19th-century fuel very badly suited for the 21st century. There's no way you can wash or scrub coal to make that essential fact go away.

Tar sands oil is dirtier, more corrosive, and worse for the environment than conventional oil.

I think we'll still be operating coal in 2030. Whether we will be in 2040, I think, is a question, or in 2050.

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.

Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I'm hopeful, but very, very concerned.

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

If we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.

The debate about climate change in many ways is tied to the petroleum industry. If the value of petroleum was considerably less than it is, and the value of coal was considerably less than it is, there would be much less debate about this.

We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

Coal is a portable climate.

Climate change is a fact. Its consequences, damages and costs are already being felt around the globe.

China and the U.S. are the two largest importers of oil. They are the two largest emitters of carbon.

I think having toured the world and seeing many places, I've just been blown away by how we've really scarred our home. I'm as guilty as the next person if not more so. I travel a lot. The damage we do to our planet is huge.

Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.