Political Quotes

“Mr. President, as the Senate reconvenes after several weeks of work in our home States, I am back for the 145th time asking my colleagues to wake up to the pressing reality of climate change. We are sleepwalking through this moment, willfully ignoring the warning signs of an already altered Earth, largely because of a decades-long corporate campaign of misinformation on the dangers of carbon pollution. Just last week, while we were back home, scientists at the International Geological Congress presented the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Transitions between geological epochs are marked by a signal--a signal in the global geologic record, like the traces of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous epoch. What are the signals of the beginning of the Anthropocene? Humans--anthropods--have increased carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere from 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 400 parts per million and rising today--a pace of increase not seen for 66 million years and a level never seen before in human history on this planet. We have also dumped so much plastic into our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles can be found virtually everywhere and are now even infiltrating our food chain.…”