Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.
Interpretation
Air travel significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to car emissions over a year.
Tatiana Schlossberg highlights the environmental impact of air travel by comparing the greenhouse gases generated from a round-trip flight between New York and California to the annual emissions from driving a car. This serves to underline the urgency of reconsidering our travel choices in light of climate change.
In practice
During a presentation on climate change, this quote can illustrate the impact of our travel habits.
As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?
When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.
The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.
A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that's not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
We do not have to choose between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.
I have bigger concerns than what pop stars are doing. I'm more concerned about our environment, what industrialists are doing to it.
We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms β from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.
I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance.
Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.
Now, as the world's largest economy and as the world's second largest emitter, America bears our responsibility to address climate change, and we intend to meet that responsibility.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.