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" Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known. "

Donella Meadows

Political

Politics

Two

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" You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere. "

" Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil. "

" Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning. "

" No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There's only one way to get a government - and a nation - to stop drifting to low performance. That's to wake up and insist on higher standards. "

" I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written. "

" If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us. "

" A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate. "

" Growth is a stupid goal. So, by the way, is no-growth. "

" The European nations take climate change very seriously. "

" We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found. "

" Some call-in moderators are neutral and courteous. Then there's Rush Limbaugh, who is funny and pompous and a scapegoater and hatemonger. His popularity could cause you to draw some terrible conclusions about the state of mind of the American people. It helps to remember that Bill Cosby is popular, too. "

" We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars. "

" Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future. "

" Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent. "

Donella Meadows

Agree

Percent

" It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone. "

" In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked. "

" A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor. "

" We don't need new laws that can be used by organizations with deep pockets and the ability to deduct legal expenses as a cost of doing business to intimidate individuals or organizations that voice legitimate concerns. "

" Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course. "

" The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings. "

" There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president. "

" There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading. "

" We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons. "

" We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life. "

" Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone's human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left. "

" The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made. "

" Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent. "

" Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone. "

" The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes. "

" What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign. "