Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor of the Senate today to speak about a number, a number that has a particular significance for us here, and that number is 400. Why is 400 an important number at this point in our history? What is important about 400 is that it is the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide that has been measured this spring in the Arctic. This is a first. We have never hit 400 before. For 8,000 centuries mankind has inhabited this planet within an atmospheric carbon dioxide range of 190 to 300 parts per million. That is the range, the bandwidth, within which we have lived. How long is 800,000 years? It is a pretty darn long time. I don't think there are any human remains or artifacts that go back further than 200,000 years. If we go back more than 10,000 years, we are only seeing the very beginnings of agriculture, where people are beginning to scratch the soil and plant things. For longer than our species has effectively inhabited this Earth, we have been in this happy bandwidth that has supported our lives, supported congenial climate for human development. We are out of that now for the first time in that period--800,000 years--and we are not just a little bit out of it. We didn't go to 302 or to 350. We have now crossed 400, and we are still going. We are still going, and there is no end in sight. We continue to dump gigatons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every single year, and we continue to subsidize the people who do the dumping.…”