What is likely to vanish – or be transformed beyond recognition – are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources. – Jeff Goodell
Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry – the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall. – Jeff Goodell
Although most Americans don’t know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East. – Jeff Goodell
Once we start deliberately messing with the climate systems, we could inadvertently shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that rainfall in the Amazon might be particularly vulnerable), causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine, and more. – Jeff Goodell
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns. – Jeff Goodell
The natural gas industry has worked long and hard to smear Josh Fox, the director of ‘Gasland,’ and has failed. – Jeff Goodell
The floods and fires and storms and droughts that Australia has suffered in the last few years have left no doubt in many Australians’ minds about just how much is a stake in a super-heated world. – Jeff Goodell
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
For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia – and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs. – Jeff Goodell
Climate scientists have long pointed to the Southwest as one of the places in the U.S. that is most vulnerable to global warming impacts, especially drought. And if there’s one thing that even climate denialists don’t dispute, dry things burn. – Jeff Goodell
In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average. – Jeff Goodell
Americans don’t pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren’t sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn’t get anybody’s pulse racing. – Jeff Goodell
By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we’re already messing with a system we don’t understand. – Jeff Goodell
Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal. – Jeff Goodell
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
In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word ‘coal’ is a remarkable and unprecedented event. – Jeff Goodell
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn’t mean that America is running out of coal (there’s plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation – the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia. – Jeff Goodell
The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry? – Jeff Goodell
With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent’s vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations. – Jeff Goodell
The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline – the country’s largest infrastructure project – would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America’s reliance on oil from the Middle East. – Jeff Goodell