James Gustave Speth > Quotes

“In the end, despite the large volume of bad news, we can conclude with an affirmation. We can say with Wallace Stevens that 'after the final no there comes a yes.' Yes, we can save what is left. Yes, we can repair and make amends. We can reclaim nature and restore ourselves. There is a bridge at the end of the world.”
― James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

“The economy is now consuming the planet’s available resources on a scale that rivals their supply while releasing its waste products back into the environment on a scale that greatly affects the major biogeophysical cycles of the planet.”
― James Gustave Speth

“The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption.”
― James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

“In addition to starting the ball rolling on an international convention, the Villach and Toronto conferences had another major upshot, this one quite unintended. Many governments, including that of the United States, did not like the scientific community taking the reins on policy entrepreneurship. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body established in 1988 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, was created (with US backing) for governments to assess anthropogenic climate change based on the latest science. Note the word Intergovernmental.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Evidence available from research to date from the Department’s activities, from that of many other agencies and from other nations is sufficient cause for serious concern, even at the most optimistic end of the range of predicted results. This is of particular interest to the Department of Energy because U.S. fossil fuel use accounts for approximately 23 percent of the global total emissions of CO2 resulting from combustion. . . . The prospects for future growth in the use of renewable technology appear especially promising as research continues to improve their efficiency, economics, and reliability. Renewable energy use can reduce carbon emissions and give developing countries attractive alternatives to the use of fossil fuels and further depletion of forests.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“In 1979, the clash between the White House’s call for climate protection and the federal government’s fossil fuel energy policies became stark.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“In the volume summary, Frederick M. Luther offered some dramatic conclusions: As the climate warms, the amount of sea ice and the extent of snow cover will generally be reduced. . . . Feedbacks and interactions of many other types can also occur among elements of the climate system. . . . These model results suggest that global average temperatures will warm by 1.5 to 4.5°C once equilibrium is achieved after the CO2 concentration has doubled. Continuing increases in the CO2 concentration above those levels would warm the Earth still further. Such changes would be large in comparison to the decadal average temperature changes of the last 10,000 years, during which prolonged, global-scale variations have probably only rarely been more than about 1°C. . . . In summary, we have a sound qualitative understanding of the causes of the warming that is occurring and is projected to occur as a result of the increasing CO2 and trace gas concentrations.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“The resulting July 1979 report, now more than four decades old, connected policy with scientific understanding of climate change, and was signed by four of our most distinguished American scientists—David Keeling, Roger Revelle, George Woodwell (lead author), and MacDonald.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“the working majority that actually makes current decisions, and not even to the whole of the living population, but to those who came before us, who provided our traditions and our physical patrimony as nations, and to those who will come after us, and who will inherit what we leave behind. Decisions in the environmental arena often touch on this broader sense of public responsibility, and we cannot afford to lose it among the numbers.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Yet while the Trump administration’s record has been deplorable, this historical analysis points out that, in many respects, the Trump administration’s record is not much worse on energy or exacerbating the climate crisis than some prior administrations, and generally continues forward the stamp of approval for fossil energy that every president before Trump has likewise backed.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Changes in soil conditions due to loss of forest cover could slow forest reestablishment. Consequently, there could be a shift in area from forest to non-forest vegetation. Fire frequencies are likely to increase in the region given increased temperatures, unchanged precipitation and higher potential evapotranspiration.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“ผมเคยคิดว่าปัญหาสิ่งแวดล้อมที่ใหญ่ที่สุดคือการสูญเสียความหลากหลายทางชีวภาพ การล่มสลายของระบบนิเวศ และการเปลี่ยนแปลงสภาพภูมิอากาศ ผมเคยคิดว่าด้วยความรู้ทางวิทยาศาสตร์ชั้นนำที่เรามีตลอด 30 ปีที่ผ่านมาจะสามารถแก้ปัญหานี้ได้ แต่ผมเข้าใจผิด ปัญหาสิ่งแวดล้อมที่ใหญ่ที่สุดคือ ความเห็นแก่ตัว ความโลภ และความไม่แยแสต่างหาก ซึ่งการจะแก้ปัญหาเหล่านั้น เราจำเป็นต้องมีการเปลี่ยนผ่านทางวัฒนธรรมและจิตวิญญาณ ซึ่งนักวิทยาศาสตร์อย่างเราไม่รู้เลยว่าต้องทำอย่างไร”
― James Gustave Speth

“One of the volumes, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and the Global Carbon Cycle,” noted that CO2 levels had varied in the last million years with a high point, during warm, interglacial phases, of 350 ppm.21 An enormous amount had been learned; the “Projecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide” alone was over 400 pages long, and is full of hard evidence of how much the federal government knew about the impacts of burning fossil fuels.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“There are some cherished values that resist being quantified or squeezed into monetary terms, but are no less real for that. Agents of democratic societies are responsible to the people, but we should remember that “the people” refers not only to”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“temperature increase that, in EPA’s assessment, was guaranteed to produce substantial climatic consequences, including disastrous flooding.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“While adverse consequences of 100 years from now are obviously less pressing than those of next year, if they are also of large magnitude and irreversible, we cannot in good conscience discount them.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Long lead times are required for effective action.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“He said it would be too late to change course once the impact of the buildup began to be felt.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“The Woodwell–MacDonald–Revelle–Keeling report to CEQ contained a major warning about this policy. It strongly criticized the president’s programs to increase coal production, stressing that synthetic fuels from coal and other hydrocarbons would release an estimated 2.3 times the amount of carbon dioxide per Btu compared to natural gas. The report made clear that the new synfuels policy the Department of Energy had developed for the president was inconsistent with protecting the climate system.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“This national energy policy of the last four decades is, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic. And it is worse today than ever.”
― James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis