Political Quotes

“I come to the Senate floor today for the 298th time in my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech series to once again call attention to the looming climate calamity. I went last week to the Our Ocean Conference--a conference founded by the United States of America and dedicated to protecting our oceans before the damage to them and ultimately to us becomes irrecoverable. It was the 10th such conference, which made it a bit of a benchmark. I was the entirety of the U.S. delegation. You are looking at it--100 percent of the entire U.S. delegation. Ordinarily, many executive branch officials come. In this case, not one executive branch official attended from the United States. And of course not. This administration is nothing more than hirelings of the fossil fuel industry, and the conference, of course, addressed the harm that fossil fuel emissions are doing in the oceans and the harm that petrochemical plastics are doing in the oceans. Fossil fuel emissions are heating up the oceans in zettajoules. It is a massive number. The joule, as you probably know, is the unit measure for heat energy. ``Zetta'' means it has 21 zeroes behind it. In more commonly articulated big numbers, it is a billion trillion joules. It looks something like this: 14 zettajoules of heat going into the oceans every single year. To give a more practical definition, the entire energy production of the human species across the entire planet Earth amounts to one-half of a zettajoule of energy--everything.…”