"If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government" (45)
---
"Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written by coal. Ever since the French Revolution, there have been pitched ideological battles within the confines of this story: communists, socialists, and trade unions have fought for more equal distribution of the spoils of extraction, winning major victories for the poor and working classes." (184)
"If opposition movements are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve these goals." (18-9)
"The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending" (28)
"Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today--like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting extraction--will start to seem reasonable." (35).
"They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations--the ideological outrages go on and on." (45)
"During these times of continual economic stress and exclusion, the communities on the front lines of saying no to dirty energy have discovered that they will never build the base they need unless they can simultaneously provide economic alternatives to the projects they are opposing." (409)
"The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s" (70)
"The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures when the extractivist project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the earth--and that older way fights back. This has been true from the earliest days of industrialization, when English and Irish peasants, for instance, revolted against the first attempts to enclose communal lands, and it has continued in clashes between colonizers and Indigenous peoples throughout the centuries, right up to--as we will see--the Indigenous led resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction gaining power today. But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out." (185)
---
"[Capitalism] wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty." (32).
---
"The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world." (120)
---
"Yet at the same time, many of us know the mirror that has been held up to us is profoundly distorted--that we are, in fact, a mess of contradictions, with our desire for self-gratification coexisting with deep compassion, our greed with empathy and solidarity." (70)
---
"Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written by coal. Ever since the French Revolution, there have been pitched ideological battles within the confines of this story: communists, socialists, and trade unions have fought for more equal distribution of the spoils of extraction, winning major victories for the poor and working classes." (184)
"If opposition movements are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve these goals." (18-9)
"The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending" (28)
"Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today--like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting extraction--will start to seem reasonable." (35).
"They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations--the ideological outrages go on and on." (45)
"During these times of continual economic stress and exclusion, the communities on the front lines of saying no to dirty energy have discovered that they will never build the base they need unless they can simultaneously provide economic alternatives to the projects they are opposing." (409)
"The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s" (70)
"The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures when the extractivist project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the earth--and that older way fights back. This has been true from the earliest days of industrialization, when English and Irish peasants, for instance, revolted against the first attempts to enclose communal lands, and it has continued in clashes between colonizers and Indigenous peoples throughout the centuries, right up to--as we will see--the Indigenous led resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction gaining power today. But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out." (185)
---
"[Capitalism] wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty." (32).
---
"The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world." (120)
---
"Yet at the same time, many of us know the mirror that has been held up to us is profoundly distorted--that we are, in fact, a mess of contradictions, with our desire for self-gratification coexisting with deep compassion, our greed with empathy and solidarity." (70)
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