Ban Ki-moon Quotes

Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.

We happen to believe that emissions going into the atmosphere are not good for us as humans or Mother Earth.

Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane.

Climate change is a consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere, and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries.

Burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. There is no debate about that. The link is as certain as the link between smoking and cancer.

The thinning of the ozone layer is blamed on logging of tropical forests. The fact that the burning of fossil fuels and release of CFCs (chloro-fluoro-carbons) into the atmosphere occur largely in the rich countries are significantly ignored.

Ultimately, refiners, like all of us, are going to have to clean up their emissions.

The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.

Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

The cumulative amount of man-made global pollution that's in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. It's a big planet, but that's an awful lot of energy.

The U.S. has historically been the world's largest contributor to climate change.

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.

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.

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

The science is clear that there is an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What is not clear from the science is how much of that increase is caused by human activity; and what also is not clear is what impact those increases have on the climatic cycle.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

The fact is that seven per cent of the global population emits 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the proportions are the same for the use of energy and raw materials, meat, wood, etc. Simply put, an infinitesimal minority consumes the most and imposes damage on the overwhelming majority, while asking it to change.

Eighty per cent of global warming comes from livestock and deforestation.

Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees.

There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.

Meat production is one of the leading causes of climate change because of the destruction of the rainforest for grazing lands, the massive amounts of methane produced by farm animals and the huge amounts of water, grain and other resources required to feed animals.