Political Quotes

“I am here today for the 243rd time to call on this Chamber to wake up to the reality of climate change. I thank my colleague Senator Cornyn for his recent statement acknowledging that the days of ignoring this are over. Now it is time to do something with keeping global warming below the 1.5 or 2 degrees Centigrade threshold target. I speak regularly about the fossil fuel industry's relentless grip on Congress and how that grip prevents action on climate. Don't get me wrong--they are still at it, but they are not the only thing slowing progress. Another impediment is the wide swathes of our news media that cover the issue torpidly or not at all or as actual propagators of falsehood. Look at the big climate stories the media ought to be covering just from 2018. The year 2018 brought two landmark climate science reports. One was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on what warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will do. The other was the Trump administration's own National Climate Assessment. These two studies delivered the starkest warnings on climate change ever--that the damage from climate change is already occurring, that world economies are now at risk, and that we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences. Even the fossil fuel industry and its stooges in the Trump administration didn't contest the science behind these reports. They know their science-denial campaign is phony.…”