Pollution Impact Quotes

Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

I said that the oceans were sick but they're not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans - there will always be life - but they're getting sicker every year.

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in America and around the world.

Global Warming

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.

We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.

How about that oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. And you know, the oil slick is going everywhere. So the next time somebody lands on the Hudson, it won't be that big a deal.

I believe in climate change.

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop

Perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to sense the impact of the environmental crisis is to confront the question which is always asked about Lake Erie: how can we restore it? I believe the only valid answer is that no one knows. For it should be clear that even if overnight all of the pollutants now pouring into Lake Erie were stopped, there would still remain the problem of the accumulated mass of pollutants in the lake bottom.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.

We have lived with deadly levels of air pollution for years, which have made us more vulnerable to coronavirus.

Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.

I was recruited to sort of be the doc to advocate for communities that were struggling with polluting incinerators, polluting coal plants, toxic waste sites, etc.

BP has put more birds in oil than Colonel Sanders.

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.

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

It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

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 world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.

Experimental evidence [shows strongly] that the chemical purity of the air is of no importance [to health.]

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.