McKenzie Funk > Quotes

“When Europe launched its emissions-trading scheme, doling out carbon permits to coal plants and power utilities, the same banker had helped them “massively overrepresent” their emissions, then helped them sell the excess for hundreds of millions of dollars. “I was actually doing the carbon deals,” he said. “All that kind of shit. That was a big scam, too.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“Among the high-ranking spooks drawn to South Florida, who perhaps dined with the foulmouthed founder at Asher’s favorite spot, the Boca Raton Club, or shared a bottle of his favorite Opus One wine at his mansion, was John Brennan. A future director of the CIA, Brennan was at the time director of something else: the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a post-9/11, cross-agency clearinghouse then nominally under the umbrella of the CIA. Later known as the National Counterterrorism Center, it was created to take in streams of classified and sensitive data from more than a dozen federal bodies—including the CIA, NSA, FBI, Department of State, and Department of Defense—and continually fuse and make sense of it all. Brennan, who oversaw the center’s rushed genesis, has described it as a “start-up” and “an unprecedented multiagency entity that would need to access, leverage, correlate, and ultimately integrate different sources of terrorism-related intelligence.” It would have needed a computer system capable of doing that.”
― McKenzie Funk, The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives

“Nowhere is humankind’s mix of vision and tunnel vision more apparent than in how we’re planning for a warmed world.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“Perhaps the most magical assumption of the moment is that our growing belief in climate change will lead to a real effort to stop it. But as I discovered in Canada and Greenland and Sudan and Seattle and all over the globe, that is not automatically true. We are noticing that in this new world, there is new oil to find. There is new cropland to farm. There are new machines to be built. From what I have seen in six years of reporting this book, the climate is changing faster than we are.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“It’s a message that says, ‘Yes, forty years from now or a hundred years from now, in 2100, things will be really bad—that’s why you shouldn’t use your energy today.’ If people won’t get that if they have unprotected sex today and it’ll kill you in a few years, why should this other message get across any better? It’s morally bankrupt for the pope to say abstinence only for people to fight HIV—it kills people to say that—and I think that’s a worse sin than fucking.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“Nicholas Minot, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “Demand for food is inelastic. People will always pay to keep eating.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“There were Inuit dignitaries and observers from Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, the pseudo-governmental Inuit corporation that had negotiated the 1999 creation of its people’s own 800,000-square-mile territory, Nunavut.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“In economic terms, global warming is not merely an externality that we have failed to price in. The free market can only get us so far. This makes it a truly wicked problem, but it also gives us a more perfect moral clarity. We are not simply borrowing against our own future. For the most part, we are not our own victims. To rely on empathy to shape our response to climate change is often considered naive—the victims of warming are distant in space, distant in time, and the bullets are invisible—but I believe it is more naive to hope that we in the north will significantly cut emissions or consumption or give needed adaptation funding to distant countries because we personally feel threatened. In”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“fourteen-hundred-mile Colorado River, which gets its dwindling water from thousands of streams, snowfields, lakes, and springs in a drainage basin covering nearly 250,000 square miles across seven western states. Without imported water, the 2.7-million-person San Diego metropolis, like much of Southern California, would be no more capable of supporting people than the coastal desert it once was. It”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“symbols of what would happen the more populations boomed, temperatures rose, rivers ran dry, and food prices—and thus the value of farmland—shot through the roof.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“There would be energy efficiency measures, electric cars, solar panels—“increasingly a world of electrons rather than molecules”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“the former because national-security priorities had shifted (no longer did we fear a Soviet attack from the north), the latter because economic priorities had not (to cut carbon was to cut fossil fuels was to cut the engine of a century of meteoric growth).”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

“frack a single well can take as many as six million gallons. In 2011, petroleum companies drilled twice as many new water wells—2,232 across the Lone Star State—as they did oil and gas wells.”
― McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming