Jeff Goodell

Jeff Goodell

29 quotes

The American author and journalist Jeff Goodell is someone whose pithy observations have become part of everyday conversation. Celebrated for a focus on energy and environmental issues, Jeff Goodell brought that same intensity to the written and spoken word. Our collection holds 35 quotes from Jeff Goodell, each offering a different angle on Change, Power, Environmental, War, and Politics. A favorite of many readers: "Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change."

“"If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for ""dangerous"" climate change."”

— Jeff Goodell

Change

All Quotes by Jeff Goodell

“Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.”

— Jeff Goodell

Science

“Bloomberg's $50 million is not going to revolutionize the electric power industry. But his willingness to fight is already inspiring others to see Big Coal differently.”

— Jeff Goodell

Power

“The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.”

— Jeff Goodell

Health

“Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.”

— Jeff Goodell

Business

“One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.”

— Jeff Goodell

Change

“When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.”

— Jeff Goodell

Power

“In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.”

— Jeff Goodell

Government

“Mark Ruffalo, aka the Incredible Hulk, is the natural gas industry's worst nightmare: a serious, committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.”

— Jeff Goodell

Environmental

“With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.”

— Jeff Goodell

Food

“Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.”

— Jeff Goodell

Power

“Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here.”

— Jeff Goodell

Food

“Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.”

— Jeff Goodell

Courage

“In reality, Republicans have long been at war with clean energy. They have ridiculed investments in solar and wind power, bashed energy-efficiency standards, attacked state moves to promote renewable energy and championed laws that would enshrine taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels while stripping them from wind and solar.”

— Jeff Goodell

Power

“The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.”

— Jeff Goodell

Power

“"If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for ""dangerous"" climate change."”

— Jeff Goodell

Change

“In the United States, we do a pretty good job of protecting iconic landscapes and postcard views, but the ocean gets no respect.”

— Jeff Goodell

Respect

“Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.”

— Jeff Goodell

Politics

“In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.”

— Jeff Goodell

Alone

“But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.”

— Jeff Goodell

Success

“Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he's already shifting the debate over climate change.”

— Jeff Goodell

Change