Explore Quotes by Jeff Goodell

When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.

One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on.

You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 - more than twice earlier projections.

If we drill the hell out of everything, including protected public lands and fragile regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America can emerge as an 'energy superpower.'

Once we start deliberately messing with the climate systems, we could inadvertently shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that rainfall in the Amazon might be particularly vulnerable), causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine, and more.

To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.

But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.

Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.

The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry?

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.

You gotta love Rick Perry's swagger. The Texas Governor is out there in the Iowa cornfields, unabashedly going to toe-to-toe with President Obama, doing his best to instantly cast himself as the big dog in the Republican pack.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.

What is likely to vanish - or be transformed beyond recognition - are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.

Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.

Coal boosters like to tout coal as cheap and plentiful - well, not anymore. At least not in China.

For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand.

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

The floods and fires and storms and droughts that Australia has suffered in the last few years have left no doubt in many Australians' minds about just how much is a stake in a super-heated world.