Quips

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
Naturalist and conservationist, John Muir “[The lobbying by today’s climate change sceptics] is reminiscent of the tobacco lobby’s attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer.”
Bob May, president of the Royal Society “It is a flagrant evil, more evil than anything else, even going to war, because you are perpetuating a lie that you know to be false. And you are jeopardising all of our futures.”
Thom Yorke of Radiohead, inveighing against climate change deniers “You hear people say that climate change isn’t having any effect yet. Well they should come to Karnataka. I’ve seen climate change happen with my own eyes. I’ve known farmers kill themselves because of droughts that never used to happen 15 years ago.”
Harish Hande, Solar Electric Light Company, Bangalore “We have roughly 45 years. And if we start now, not in 10 or 15 years’ time, we have a chance.”
Lord Oxburgh, non-executive chairman of Shell UK, speaking out on the urgency of the climate change challenge “Shell is an energy company, not an oil company, and the fact is that neither Shell nor any other energy company is going to be doing business in the same way in 25 years’ time.”
Ron Oxburgh again, this time in a Guardian interview “First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win.”
Mahatma Gandhi “That part of one’s environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.”
American satirist Ambrose Bierce’s dictionary definition of ‘out of doors’

21 July 2005