Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today is the 135th time I have come to give voice to the issue that I feel will most significantly define this generation of leadership in the United States and, frankly, around the globe. I know that there are many people in Washington who would prefer to ignore what our carbon emissions are doing to our oceans and to our climate, but we disregard nature's warnings at our peril. The changes to our environment, fueled by our carbon pollution, are far-reaching--from the coastlines to the prairies, from mountain tops to deep oceans, from pole to pole. As a terrestrial species, we naturally pay more attention to what is happening on land, such as increasing average global temperatures and upheavals in extreme weather. We don't so much see what is happening in our oceans. Every year we emit into the Earth's thin atmosphere tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels--nearly 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2014. Not all of that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. Our oceans--the Earth's oceans--absorb approximately one- third of all our carbon pollution. That means they have absorbed roughly 600 gigatons in our industrial era. For the record, a gigaton is a billion tons--not a thousand tons, not a million tons, but a billion tons--and 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide have gone into our oceans. We know what that does. All that carbon dioxide in the oceans changes the ocean's very chemistry, and it makes ocean water more acidic.…”