Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
Interpretation
The quote compares climate change denial to Holocaust denial, emphasizing the irrationality and unacceptability of denying well-established truths.
George Monbiot's quote highlights the absurdity of denying climate change by equating it with the denial of the Holocaust, an atrocity that is universally recognized as a horrific fact of history. This parallel serves to criticize those who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, suggesting that such denial is not only misguided but morally reprehensible, thereby calling for a greater awareness and action regarding environmental issues.
In practice
In a debate about environmental policy, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of acknowledging climate change.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.
Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.
If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced endeavors, in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
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