Bobby Scott Quotes

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.

When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.

It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.

The oil companies, the big polluters, and the climate deniers are incredibly powerful. They will do everything they can to protect their profits.

By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.

Taking on corporate greed is an environmental concern.

We can no longer allow special corporate interests to shape our political and financial decisions, while our citizens and communities cry for real climate action.

I get a lot of mud slung at me, and yes, I do take planes, but I feel that's my life. My life is to travel and also to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of an irresponsible oil company.

It is not natural or inevitable that half the world goes hungry; that the freedom of markets trumps protection of the planet; or that citizens' rights come second to those of corporations.

Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

You know, I never fight for corporate America.

Commercial institutions, proud of their achievements, do not see that healthy living systems - clean air and water, healthy soil, stable climates - are integral to a functioning economy. As our living systems deteriorate, traditional forecasting and business economics become the equivalent of house rules on a sinking cruise ship.

It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.

I was in college when tens of thousands of people marched on Washington for the first Earth Day. Raw sewage floated in rivers and clouds of smog hung over cities. But then something amazing happened. People spoke out. Thousands of students, workers, and ordinary citizens used their voices to say, 'This has to change.'

Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.

What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.

Environmental agencies in China are hamstrung by local officials who put economic growth ahead of environmental protection; even the courts are beholden to local officials, and they are not open to environmental litigation.

Meanwhile, people have to join us and fight back against the federal government that has dropped the ball, that is in bed with these energy companies, that wants them to make more money than they've made before.

The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.

We can't go to courts in China, so we have to find alternate ways, like working with brands to try and create a level playing field by identifying the most obvious polluters.

Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.

Industries who profit by the rape of our environment see to it that legislators friendly to their attitudes are elected, and that bureaucrats of similar attitude are appointed.

No-one wants polluted air, water or land, denuded forests or extinct animal species. But the error most people make is to trust the legislature to prevent these tragedies. What they don’t realize is how big a role the legislature has played historically in causing environmental destruction.