Michael Oppenheimer Quotes

Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, / For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. / America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, / And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

There would be no call for ecological campaigning had nature not been exploited and abused. We experience the ground now bringing forth thistles as soil erosion devastates formerly arable land and deserts overtake fertile farms. Rivers and the atmosphere are polluted thoughtlessly and we are fearful of the consequences of a depleted ozone layer and the devastation of the greenhouse effect. We are not quite at home in our world, and somewhere in each of us there is a nostalgia for a paradise that has been lost.

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.

We don't have seasons anymore. You know why? We lost the ozone layer. Well, put it on milk cartons - let's find it!

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

The park lies directly downwind from a slew of coal plants. Virtually all of the major contaminants in the local air and water are direct results of coal emissions. Coal produces ozone, which kills trees. Coal produces sulfates, which kill fish. No other park in the country has more ozone or sulfates than Shenandoah National Park.

Back when the EPA proposed phasing out ozone-depleting CFCs, the chemical industry howled that refrigerators would fail in America's supermarkets, hospitals and schools.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

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.

The living world has become impoverished. Species are being lost every day. Energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion. The environment is deteriorating. Pollution is everywhere. Climate is changing. Natural balances are threatened.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

Way up high in the Shenandoah Mountains where I live, it is difficult to maintain illusions about the natural world. It is dying.

The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.

Every day, TV, newspapers, and the Internet bombard us with a message that we're destroying the earth. Ice caps are melting, rivers are dying, polar bears are drowning, and trees are doing something.

It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it!

When I was a kid, we never heard of smog, ozone depletion, acid rain, green house gasses.

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.

Ozone is something that we most definitely have to regulate. It's a very important thing to regulate.

There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important.