Quote

When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.

Dale Jamieson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Government
Climate
Manifest
Weakness
Barriers
Ignorance
Indifference
Citizens
Usual
Short
Extreme
Comes
Corporations
Change
Greed
Sightedness
Power
Extremes
Mendacity

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

Image
Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
Image
The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.
Dale Jamieson
Image
A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the default states, and everything else involves some perturbation. This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.
Dale Jamieson
Image
I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
Dale Jamieson
Image
The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.
Dale Jamieson
Image
If you're interested in doing something about climate change as we all should be, all of us who care about future people and creatures that will inhabit this world. Then buying a Prius is a good thing but an even better thing would be to be on the streets demanding urgent action from the United States' Congress.
Dale Jamieson
Image
If you have a flat, fixed view of state interest then it is difficult to understand why some states adopt aggressive climate change policies, even when that risks economically disadvantaging them, and other states do not even when it would be in their economic interests to do so.
Dale Jamieson
Image
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's non-ideal theory).
Dale Jamieson
Image
If you look globally you see a patchwork of jurisdictions (nations, states, provinces, cities) that have taken aggressive action on climate change, and a patchwork of jurisdictions that have not. These various policies reflect the politics of each jurisdiction and the values of its citizens.
Dale Jamieson
Image
In trying to develop an impartial, expansive ethic we are trying to get ethical systems to do something which they did not evolve in order to do. This doesn't mean that it can't be done or that we shouldn't try to expand the reach of our ethical frameworks, only that there are reasons to be skeptical about its success.
Dale Jamieson
Image
If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Dale Jamieson
Image
The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.
Dale Jamieson
Image
It's obvious that there are vast variety of consequentialist views, depending on what we think goodness consists in, what our notion of consequence is, and what level (or levels) of human action we think the principle should be applied.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
Dale Jamieson
Image
I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
Dale Jamieson