"[On the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from Working Group 1 of the w:IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown."
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English journalist, author, and environmental and political activist. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and has written several books.
"While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it."
"[T]he Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed. Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide."
"The power of consumerism is that it renders us powerless. It traps us within a narrow circle of decision-making, in which we mistake insignificant choices between different varieties of destruction for effective change. It is, we must admit, a brilliant con. It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers. [...] Only mass political disruption, out of which can be built new and more responsive democratic structures, can deliver the necessary transformation."
"Climate change requires the end of capitalism, full-stop. Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of capitalism it is, whether it’s Keynesian, whether it’s neo-liberal capitalism, whether it’s corporate capitalism, or whether it’s crony capitalism. The problem is not with the adjective, but with the noun. Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction… firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth... (Second:)…the idea that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we’ve got in the bank or we can borrow. So, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like.... The third characteristic is the one that really ensures that people go along with capitalism, the idea that everyone can pursue — and can expect to find — private luxury."
"On December 12, 2015, official delegates and observers gathered in the plenary hall of COP21. It was there that the Paris Agreement was announced. The end result of decades of work, world leaders hailed it as a great success. "The Paris Agreement is a monumental triumph for people and our planet," UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon tweeted immediately after the closing gavel fell. Many environmental groups praised the outcome as well…Not everyone agreed. Joining Michael Brune on Democracy Now!, British journalist and author George Monbiot countered, "What I see is an agreement with no timetables, no targets, with vague, wild aspirations. Its almost as if its now safe to adopt 1.5 degrees centigrade as their aspirational target now that it is pretty well impossible to reach. I see a lot of backslapping, a lot of self-congratulation, and I see very little in terms of the actual substance that is required to avert climate breakdown." Monbiot wrote, "By comparison to what it could have been, its a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, its a disaster."
"The pheasants properties of metamorphosis should be a rich field of study for biologists: even the Greek myths mentioned no animal that mutated so often. In the treatment of pheasant and grouse shoots we see in microcosm what is happening in the country as a whole. Legally, fiscally and politically, the very rich are protected from the forces afflicting everyone else."