Political Quotes

“this is the 289th time that I have come to the Senate floor with my increasingly battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart, to stir this Chamber to act on climate change. Since 2016, I have been talking about the zettajoule. The zettajoule is the measure of how much fossil fuel emissions are heating up our oceans. In this season of extreme, record-smashing heat touching all 50 States, it is wild that elected representatives in Washington still choose to insulate themselves from reality, a reality measured in zettajoules. A zettajoule is a number almost beyond comprehension in its size. One joule--J-O-U-L-E--is our standard unit of energy, and it applies to heat energy. A zettajoule is 1 joule with 21 zeros behind it. It is a truly massive number. In a 2019 ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I reported that more than nine zettajoules of heat energy was being added to the ocean annually. Since then, I have come to the floor with an updated number. Our oceans are absorbing around 14 zettajoules of excess heat every year. Let's put that in context. The total energy consumption of all humankind amounts to about one-half of a zettajoule of energy per year. That means that for the fossil fuel component of that one-half of a zettajoule of energy, we pay the price of 14 added zettajoules of heat into the ocean every year. Said another way, we load into our Earth's oceans every year nearly 30 times the entire energy use of the entire species on the entire planet.…”