P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

There are those who say that climate change is a hoax, a concoction of radical environmentalists and a liberal media. That is simply hogwash.... To ignore and dismiss the threat of climate change to the economy and the environment is like insisting the earth is flat.

Before we start criticizing capitalism, we ought to try it. We don't factor the value of nature and its services into the market equation. Every year we use roughly $33 trillion worth of nature's services throughout the world's civilizations, and we make little or no effort to pay any of that back. We just use it. Look at the service a bee provides us, for example. A bee doesn't charge hourly fees or anything else. But if we lose the bees, we're not going to eat. And the pollinators are disappearing.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

Californians want to have clean air, clean water - not like the Trump Administration is trying to do with its rollback of environmental regulations, like the reversal of the Clean Power Plan.

Buy less, choose well, make it last. Quality rather than quantity: That is true sustainability. If people only bought beautiful things rather than rubbish, we wouldn't have climate change!

I think climate change is probably the most extreme, and it's been going on for years because it's very difficult to talk about a planetary issue like climate change and to get people who live within four-year electoral cycles to actually pay attention to something that you predict is happening way in the future.

We might hope to change the world through better, bigger programs to stop global warming, but global warming will not end unless people become less greedy and less wasteful, gaining a fresh vision of what it means to love our global neighbor.

Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

Climate change is a big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money.

I think that the environment is very a complicated question. I am very sympathetic to people who support the environment who live in the United States. I am very sympathetic to people who don't support the environment who live in a very poor country.

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

Is there a way to discuss climate change without politics or religion getting in the way?

I have been fighting climate change and working to improve our environment.

Climate change is real and needs honest debate about measures to restrain and remediate it. But that would be serious. So instead we are told the planet is going to burn up and our only option is to reverse millennia of human progress. And our leaders spent the last few years trying to win the approval of an angry Swedish teenager.

The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it's possible to change.

Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself-or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else's problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems.

But no matter how big the effort to push a propaganda line might be, climate change is bigger. This, undoubtedly and regrettably, is the biggest immediate long-term environmental challenge we face. A failure to concretely come to some policy outcome on climate change has not only a negative environmental impact but also social and economic consequences for us.

Nothing is costed properly and it's destroying the earth. We need to re-educate people that what is good for the planet is good for the financial system.

We now know that climate action does not require economic sacrifice. This is fully in line with the World Bank Group's findings. It is up to all of us to make smart policy choices that will help combat climate change. For example, putting a price on carbon is a necessary step and could drive resources and investments to a cleaner economy.

This year - today - I am repenting of my dependence on fossil fuels.

When you frack a well, you're exploding methane up into the atmosphere. So, Barack Obama, by supporting natural gas, and also talking about climate change is literally burning his own inaugural address. And he's doing it with natural gas.

Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past ... [A] new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programs and initiatives.

I don't know how you can live on the planet and not care about the environment. It's our globe, we share it.