"Over the past two decades, as Lessig notes, sixteen different new laws have passed that ad additional teeth to copyright restrictions, while not a single one has passed restricting industrial carbon output. There are genuine debates to be had over music piracy and global warming, but surely the vast majority of us would agree that factories pumping carbon into the atmosphere with impunity are a more pressing concern than illegal Kanye West downloads. Yet the congressional record is clear: sixteen to zero. Why? Because content business and carbon polluters spent billions of dollars supporting candidates from both parties over that period. So we have a political class that spends its time protecting Mickey Mouse and Lady Gaga instead of the planet."
— Steven Johnson on page 158 of his book, Future Perfect
"We don’t, in a sensible world, want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren, to leave them with the real problem. I don’t want to be confronted by my future grandchild and (have) them say: ‘Why didn’t you do something?’"
— Prince Charles • On the issue of climate change and why he doesn’t want his soon-to-be-born grandson to question why he didn’t do more about it. (via shortformblog)
(via shortformblog)
"Between March and September, 4.57 million square miles of Arctic sea ice—an area larger than the size of the continental United States—melted. On September 16, the Arctic ice sheet hit its lowest extent ever, which was nearly 20 percent smaller than the previous record low on Sept. 18, 2007. The minimum ice cover of 1.3 million square miles was about half of the average cover between 1979 and 2000."
— UN Report: 2012 Arctic Ice Melt Larger Than Size of United States (via usnews)
