John McDonnell Quotes

In 1985, as a community activist and GLC councillor, I organised the first ever public meeting to explain the threat of a third runway at Heathrow airport for my local community.

The two million or so residents who live beneath the Heathrow flight path are accustomed to the noise. However, they are right to feel that any expansion would represent an unacceptable broken promise.

The problem is that everywhere the gas drilling industry goes, a trail of water contamination, air pollution, health concerns and betrayal of basic American civic and community values follows.

Heathrow expansion is an object lesson in the dominance of a rapacious sector of industry over government decision-making.

Nationally, unrestrained Heathrow expansion has prevented the balanced development of regional airports and their economies and the planning of an integrated transport system maximising more environmentally friendly modes of transport such as rail linked more effectively to Europe.

Communities and neighborhoods are affected. Idling trains, traffic backups, grade crossing accidents and other safety issues all affect the quality of life in our neighborhoods.

Historically, Heathrow has been something of a joke, outweighed by its excellent connections. We have to aspire to having an airport at Heathrow with two runways which is a world-class airport. It's a big challenge.

The environmental effects of the automobile are well known: motor vehicles cause, for example, as much as 75 percent of the noise and 80 percent of the air pollution in our cities, and the industry must face mounting pressure from environmentalists.

A lot of the O'Hare Modernization Plan may have been a mistake.

It's not just Porter Ranch. There's communities like Chatsworth. There's communities like Northridge. There's communities like Granada Hills - and a lot of them are writing to me.

I wrote an essay about leaf blowers and the evil they do.

The less money you have the more likely you are to live close to polluted roads. Most of us cannot choose to move further away from a main road or add another 40 minutes to our commute so that we can live in a quiet, clean, leafy street.

We promote new fossil fuel infrastructure, from airport expansion and coal mines in the U.K. to oil pipelines in the U.S. Investments are meant to build and secure our shared future - but all these fossil fuel investments are directly fuelling the climate crisis that threatens to undermine that future.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

I wish for many reasons flying had never been invented.

What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?

We can't be in the business of carting fresh air around the country.

I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country. ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today.

Fortunately, we know more about the problems that we have than in all preceding history. We know now the consequences of the things that we put into the air, into the water - of the way we treat life on Earth.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

What we put into the atmosphere in terms of burning fuel is unprecedented.

In Washington, the air quality today was described as 'red.'...You know what 'red' is? It's bad for everyone. Not just old people, sick people and babies. When it's just bad for old people, sick people and babies, that's called a Republican budget.

The forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear theatmosphere of smoke.

Global warming is another big area that we need to get on top of. And diseases in Africa, which we're also working on and seeing if we can make a difference on. And there are lots of issues that governments seem to be blind about.

Here in the Great Lakes region, a fourth year in a row of declining water levels has caused millions of dollars in losses for shipping companies, marinas and other businesses and prompted further restrictions on future water withdrawals for expanding suburbs. "A lot of people just can't believe that we may be running out of water, living this close to the Great Lakes," said Sarah Nerenberg, a water engineer with the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which conducted the study on shortages.