Naomi Klein Quotes

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

Events like Hurricane Katrina and the Minnesota bridge collapse suggest a national infrastructure that has suffered from lack of tending.

When you travel across America, when you take the trains and drive on its roads, when you visit cities in the middle of the country, the dismal—even rotting—state of American infrastructure is surprising.

We cannot prevent hurricanes or earthquakes, floods or volcanic eruptions. But we can ensure that both people and communities are better prepared and more resilient.

I think our cities' deteriorating infrastructure is a silent crisis.

It's all right. You guys in New York City can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later, so let's be fair.

Many, many large cities have old, crumbling infrastructure that have got to be dealt with in the nearest future, or they're going to be in serious trouble. They'll be unlivable if they don't do something.

Every day in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.

Yet we didn't fix anything. Our roads are bad, our bridges are bad, our tunnels are bad, our schools are bad, our hospitals are bad.

This was the most anticipated natural disaster in history.

The bottom line is that the impacts of climate change can exacerbate resource competition, threaten livelihoods, and increase the risk of instability and conflict, especially in places already undergoing economic, political, and social stress.

A lot of America is stressed by Mother Nature.

I've been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

Typhoon Haiyan showed the entire world how vulnerable the Philippines as well as other developing countries are to natural disasters.

Events like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy were unlike any weather disasters before. They showed the world who suffers the most from the impacts of extreme weather: low-income families and communities of color.

I hope weather coverage on a national level will help folks learn to respect the power of severe weather, and weather in general, so more lives are spared.

The U.N. has brought peace and order to many places around the world. However, terrorism, violent extremism, violations of human rights, natural disasters caused by climate change - they all threaten the lives of people today. Add migration, insufficient health care, lack of education, and the picture gets even bleaker.

The direct risks from climate change are obvious: as changing weather patterns cause extremes of flood and drought, hurricanes and typhoons. These damage the physical infrastructure of buildings and bridges roads and railways. They are violent and disruptive.

The risk to cities from climate impacts carries great social and economic cost and, of course, the loss of human lives.

We must recognize that Small Island Developing States are particularly vulnerable to climate change, natural disasters, and external shocks.

I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

No one can prevent hurricanes, but prosperous communities are much better able to withstand them than poor ones.

[On 9/11:] ... those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall.

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