Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am here for the 134th time to urge the Senate to wake up to the growing threat of global climate change. I am afraid my chart here is getting a little bit beat up after all of these speeches. I hope we can begin to make progress. But we continue here in this body to be besieged by persistent and meretricious denial. Of course, the polluters want us to do nothing. They are so happy to offload to everybody else the costs of the harm from fossil fuels: the cost of heat waves, the cost of sea level rise, the cost of ocean acidification, the cost of dying forests, and the rest of it. They are running a very profitable ``we keep the profits, you bear the costs'' racket. They spend rivers of money on lobbying and on politics and on a complex PR machine that fills the airwaves with sound bites of cooked-up, paid-for doubt about climate change. I believe the worst of them actually know better, but they do it any way. In this turbulence, the Wall Street Journal editorial page regularly sides with the rightwing climate denial operations. So, naturally, they have challenged my call for an appropriate inquiry into whether the fossil fuel industry's decades long and purposeful campaign of misinformation has run afoul of Federal civil racketeering laws. Now, it is very hard for them to argue that the fossil fuel industry should be exempt from fraud laws.…”