The Water Will Come Quotes

“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, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We’re not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“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, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“The simple truth is, human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn’t intend and don’t entirely understand.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“the climate is warming, the world’s great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“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, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland. Often you hear about the disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the glaciers in Patagonia, but in the context of drowning cities, land-based glaciers won’t contribute much. What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“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, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“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, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“LOYAL TO THE SOIL—WE NEED WATER NOT OIL and IF WE DESTROY CREATION, CREATION WILL DESTROY US.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“In Virginia, much of the head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change can be traced to the political power of the fossil fuel industry, especially Big Coal. Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest electric power company, is also one of the biggest coal burners in America.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“When people have to pay more and own more of the risk themselves, their decisions about where and how they live will change.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“It begins with this: the climate is warming, the world’s great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“The most surreal consequence of melting ice and rising seas is that together they are a kind of time machine, so real that they are altering the length of our days. It works like this: As the glaciers melt and the seas rise, gravity forces more water toward the equator. This changes the shape of the Earth ever so slightly, making it fatter around the middle, which in turns slows the rotation of the planet similarly to the way a ballet dancer slows her spin by spreading out her arms. The slowdown isn’t much, just a few thousandths of a second each year, but like the barely noticeable jump of rising seas every year, it adds up. When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a day lasted only about twenty-three hours.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“nobody wants to spend money to build a more resilient city because nobody owns the risk.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“In 2015, an exhaustive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that rising CO2 pollution had made the 2007–2010 drought in Syria twice as likely to occur, and that the four-year drought had a “catalytic effect” on political unrest in the area. Herders were forced off their land, seeking food and water elsewhere. More than 1.5 million rural people were displaced, causing a massive migration into urban areas, where they bumped up against an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. When researchers asked one displaced Syrian farmer whether she thought the drought had caused the civil war, she replied, “Of course. The drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution. When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“New York is surprisingly at risk. First, it’s on an estuary. The Hudson River, which runs along the west side of the city, needs an exit. So unlike with a harbor city like, say, Tokyo, or a city on a lagoon like Venice, you can’t just wall New York off from the rising ocean. Second, there are a lot of low areas, including the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts and Lower Manhattan, which have been enlarged by landfill over the years (if you compare the map of damage from Sandy in 2012 with a map of Manhattan in 1650, you’ll see that they match pretty well—almost all the flooding occurred in landfill areas). The amount of real estate at risk in New York is mind-boggling: 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion stand in flood zones today, with thousands more buildings at risk with each foot of sea-level rise. In addition, New York has a lot of industrial waterfront, where toxic materials and poor communities live in close proximity, as well as a huge amount of underground infrastructure—subways, tunnels, electrical systems. Finally, New York is a sea-level-rise hotspot. Because of changes in ocean dynamics, as well as the fact that the ground beneath the city is sinking as the continent recovers from the last ice age, seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

“Lower Manhattan is the most valuable chunk of real estate on the planet, as well as the economic engine for the entire region—if it can’t be protected, then New York City is in deep trouble.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World