Top 50 Jeff Goodell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate to offset global warming – is a nightmare fix for climate change.”

— Jeff Goodell

2. “So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them.”

— Jeff Goodell

3. “When it comes to global warming, coal is the gorilla in the room.”

— Jeff Goodell

4. “One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.”

— Jeff Goodell

5. “The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call ‘external costs,’ like the health effects of air and water pollution.”

— Jeff Goodell

6. “When it comes to energy, cost isn’t everything – but it’s a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.”

— Jeff Goodell

7. “Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.”

— Jeff Goodell

8. “Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it’s filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.”

— Jeff Goodell

9. “In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.”

— Jeff Goodell

10. “Not since the days of George W. Bush’s ‘Clear Skies’ and ‘Healthy Forests’ initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline.”

— Jeff Goodell

11. “With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.”

— Jeff Goodell

12. “Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he’s already shifting the debate over climate change.”

— Jeff Goodell

13. “Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.”

— Jeff Goodell

14. “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

15. “One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America’s energy problems never give up.”

— Jeff Goodell

16. “It may be too late for West Virginia to save itself from the ravages of Big Coal. But it’s not too late for America.”

— Jeff Goodell

17. “Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.”

— Jeff Goodell

18. “Mark Ruffalo, aka the Incredible Hulk, is the natural gas industry’s worst nightmare: a serious, committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.”

— Jeff Goodell

19. “We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year. We’re just doing it badly. Why not get good at it?”

— Jeff Goodell

20. “Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands – or will we imprison them?”

— Jeff Goodell

21. “In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.”

— Jeff Goodell

22. “In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word ‘coal’ is a remarkable and unprecedented event.”

— Jeff Goodell

23. “This Dewdrop World is a beautiful, courageous, intimate film about love and loss. It may also be the deepest meditation on climate change that I’ve ever seen.”

— Jeff Goodell

24. “Some studies suggest that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by the end of the century.”

— Jeff Goodell

25. “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

26. “Bloomberg’s $50 million is not going to revolutionize the electric power industry. But his willingness to fight is already inspiring others to see Big Coal differently.”

— Jeff Goodell

27. “Climate change is a global issue – from the point of view of the Earth’s climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.”

— Jeff Goodell

28. “Coal boosters like to tout coal as cheap and plentiful – well, not anymore. At least not in China.”

— Jeff Goodell

29. “Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.”

— Jeff Goodell

30. “When I asked the mayor if flood insurance rates had gone up after Sandy, he said, “Not really.” This is how disaster relief works in America. There are lots of incentives to rebuild but few incentives to rebuild differently, much less to rethink the long-term future of cities and towns along the coast.”

— Jeff Goodell

31. “But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.”

— Jeff Goodell

32. “Obama’s record on climate issues is not all bad.”

— Jeff Goodell

33. “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

34. “If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.”

— Jeff Goodell

35. “In the United States, we do a pretty good job of protecting iconic landscapes and postcard views, but the ocean gets no respect.”

— Jeff Goodell

36. “Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.”

— Jeff Goodell

37. “Is it in our national interest to overheat the planet? That’s the question Obama faces in deciding whether to approve Keystone XL, a 2,000-mile-long pipeline that will bring 500,000 barrels of tar-sand oil from Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.”

— Jeff Goodell

38. “The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.”

— Jeff Goodell

39. “When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good – it just needs to be clean energy.”

— Jeff Goodell

40. “You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 – more than twice earlier projections.”

— Jeff Goodell

41. “Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.”

— Jeff Goodell

42. “Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?”

— Jeff Goodell

43. “If we drill the hell out of everything, including protected public lands and fragile regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America can emerge as an ‘energy superpower.’”

— Jeff Goodell

44. “It’s not all Obama’s fault: His plans to rebuild America’s energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.”

— Jeff Goodell

45. “Geuze compared sea-level rise to other transformative catastrophes, such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a partly man-made natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role government plays in ensuring the long-term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. “We’re going to need a new New Deal,” Geuze argued. “It is going to require a rethinking of the social contract between governments and citizens.”

— Jeff Goodell

46. “Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.”

— Jeff Goodell

47. “New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also happens to be the 10th richest person in America, with a personal fortune of some $18 billion, likes to pick a fight – especially fights where the line between good and evil is particularly stark.”

— Jeff Goodell

48. “You gotta love Rick Perry’s swagger. The Texas Governor is out there in the Iowa cornfields, unabashedly going to toe-to-toe with President Obama, doing his best to instantly cast himself as the big dog in the Republican pack.”

— Jeff Goodell

49. “President Obama is in no danger of being judged by history as an eco-radical.”

— Jeff Goodell

50. “Nobody disputes that cheap natural gas would be a good thing for the economy. The question is, is this a sustainable new development that can be counted on for decades to come, or simply a ‘bubble’ brought on by a land grab and drilling frenzy?”

— Jeff Goodell