Who are the biggest polluters in the world? This question is often shrouded in mystery, but @guardian has written an exceptional series on the 20 biggest polluters on the planet, their impacts, and who owns them. Needless to say, the biggest polluters are primarily oil and gas companies. According to Guardian’s 9 October article, these 20 companies have knowingly produced about 35% of all greenhouse gas emissions from 1965 to 2017. The Guardian uses the year 1965 because that is when the oil companies became aware that burning fossil fuels was directly correlated to climate change. There is a paper trail indicating they knew the climate would start to destabilize around the year 2000. Another Guardian article examines how just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all global emissions. Digging deeper, these same powerful companies have successfully diverted blame to the consumers (us) for the problem, without taking any responsibility for the part they play. It’s true that our individual choices matter. A recent study found that 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from household decisions, such as personal vehicles, meat-based diets, housing, and heating and cooling. This doesn’t exonerate the biggest polluters in the world, many of which are investor-owned (some are owned by governments). These global conglomerates have known for decades the disaster that awaits us. Yet the oil executives continue to disseminate false information and promote climate change denialism, while they reap record profits, and the planet smothers and drowns. Our political systems have failed to stop it. So what can we do to stop it? Listed are 13 things we can do as individuals to help. The number one thing we can do is VOTE. Did you know that environmentalists don’t typically vote? Given the crisis we face, it’s all hands on deck at this point. If you are an environmentalist and if you live in a democracy, please vote and donate to politicians who will fight climate change and pollution. See the other 12 things we can do to help stop the oncoming crisis.
❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜
❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜
❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜
❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. ❜
❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜
❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜
❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜
❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜
❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜
❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜
❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜
❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜
❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜
❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜
❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜
❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜
❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜
❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜
❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜
❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜
❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜
❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. ❜
❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜
❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜
❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜
❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜
❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜
❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜
❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜
❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜
❛ Do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you? ❜
❛ Hi. Hello! There you are! Listen: You can’t speak. You can’t move. ❜
❛ We have this dance competition and the winner gets crowned. ❜
❛ As an offering for our Father, we will today surrender nine human lives. ❜
❛ You will today be joined in harmony with Everything. ❜
❛ Maybe you can redeem this! ❜
❛ Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing? It’s actually kind of outrageously unsubtle, the fact that you’re being this bold about it, I’m honestly kind of impressed? ❜
❛ It makes him open, for the source. ❜
❛ Do you think that there is a masochistic part of you that is playing out this particular drama to avoid the work you actually need to be doing? ❜
❛ Wow, okay, thanks for the psychoanalysis. ❜
❛ You know, I’m very, very glad you’re coming. I think it’s very good you’re coming. ❜
❛ You know that what you’re doing is unethical, and leechy, and lazy. And, frankly, it’s kind of sad. ❜
❛ But I have always felt held. By a family. A real family. Which everyone deserves. And you deserve. ❜
❛ Are you not disturbed by what we just saw? ❜
❛ The Queen must ride alone. ❜
❛ You know what, um, I’m worried I’ll have a bad trip. ❜
❛ What? Okay, relax. Relax! What did I do? ❜
❛ I think we really need to just at least try to acclimate. ❜
❛ Hey. How you doing? Today was tough. Are you going to be okay? ❜
❛ And yet, I was the most excited for you to come. ❜
❛ I’m really sorry. Thank you for inviting me, but I really have to go. Can someone maybe drive me somewhere? ❜
BOOK STARTERS VOL.50 SMOKE AND MIRRORS NEIL GAIMAN
❛ When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. ❜
❛ My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely. ❜
❛ Would it be worse to love someone who is no longer there, or not to love someone who is? ❜
❛ Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. ❜
❛ It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. ❜
❛ Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on. ❜
❛ Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure. ❜
❛ He died alone. It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone. ❜
❛ It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind. ❜
❛ The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. ❜
❛ She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. ❜
❛ Daylight is always safe. ❜
❛ If not for death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with death, well, their lives will have meaning. ❜
❛ You want to know the future, love? Then wait. ❜
❛ There are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. ❜
❛ Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated ❜
❛ But sometimes you leave blood on your instruments. ❜
❛ I’d like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests. ❜
❛ You’ve seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. ❜
❛ They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. ❜
❛ Good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. ❜
❛ That miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. ❜
❛ Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it is easy. ❜
❛ Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. ❜
❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜
❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control. ❜
❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜
❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜
❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜
❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜
❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜
❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜
❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜
❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜
❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜
❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜
❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜
❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜
❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜
❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜
❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜
❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜
❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜
❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜
❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜
❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜
❛ Time does not compose me. ❜
❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜
❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜
❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜
❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜
❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜
❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜
❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. ❜
❛ By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜
❛ I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. ❜
❛ And the reasons? There are no reasons. ❜
❛ Love does not exist, it’s like religion, made to control you. ❜
❛ After all, we’re not fucking stupid. At least, we’re not that fucking stupid. ❜
❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜
❛ Everything in the street today seems soft focus. ❜
❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low. ❜
❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin’ miles off the pace. ❜
❛ It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream. ❜
❛ It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but I fear that this internal sea is going to subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in my body. ❜
❛ It cuts me up. It confuses me. ❜
❛ It’s not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. ❜
❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜
❛ They mean well, and they mean well to me, but there’s no way under the sun that they can appreciate what I feel, what I need. ❜
❛ The pit of melancholy is a bottomless one, and I am descending fast. ❜
❛ Living like this is a full-time business. ❜
❛ I’ll stand or fall alone. ❜
❛ We are no wiser now than at the start. ❜
❛ This is pathetic, and fucking boring. ❜
❛ Death is usually a process, rather than an event. ❜
❛ We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? ❜
❛ We are all acquaintances now. ❜
❛ The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads of poisonous flotsam and jetsam. ❜
❛ Life is beautiful. I’m going to enjoy it, and I’m going to have a long life. ❜
❛ The grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. ❜
❛ There must be more to life than this. ❜
❛ We all see what we want to see. ❜
❛ Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else. ❜
BOOK STARTERS VOL.46 THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD MARGARET ATWOOD
❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜
❛ Maybe that’s what love is: it’s being pissed off. ❜
❛ You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much. ❜
❛ Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God. ❜
❛ Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. ❜
❛ We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. ❜
❛ Everyone wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. ❜
❛ We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. ❜
❛ How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. ❜
❛ Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering: Mine! Mine! ❜
❛ All creatures know that some must die ; that all the rest may take and eat. ❜
❛ Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? ❜
❛ Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. ❜
❛ Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? ❜
❛ Love is useless, it leads you into dumb exchanges in which you give too much away, and then you get bitter and mean. ❜
❛ Maybe sadness is a kind of hunger. Maybe the two go together. ❜
❛ Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody – a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. ❜
❛ If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time. ❜
❛ You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. ❜
❛ I’m fine, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. ❜
❛ Because if you can’t wish, why bother? ❜
❛ It’s better to hope than mope! ❜
❛ Reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows. ❜
❛ In any case, time is not a thing that passes, it’s a sea on which you float. ❜
❛ I know I’m deceiving myself, but I prefer to deceive myself. I desperately need to believe such pure joy is still possible. ❜
❛ Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered. ❜
❛ Behind my eyelids I saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned. ❜
MOVIE STARTERS VOL.15 THE MATRIX THE WACHOWSKI SISTERS
❛ I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. ❜
❛ Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. ❜
❛ This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. ❜
❛ What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets? ❜
❛ I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid… you’re afraid of me. ❜
❛ I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. ❜
❛ What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. ❜
❛ Sooner or later you’re going to realise just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. ❜
❛ I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole? ❜
❛ I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. ❜
❛ I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life. ❜
❛ Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. ❜
❛ You have to let it all go. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. ❜
❛ To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human. ❜
❛ After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss. ❜
❛ Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? ❜
❛ As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. ❜
❛ You’re cuter than I thought. I can see why she likes you. ❜
❛ I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. ❜
❛ Never send a human to do a machine’s job. ❜
❛ What are you waiting for? You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are, know you are. ❜
❛ Come on. Stop trying to hit me and hit me. ❜
❛ So what do you need? Besides a miracle. ❜
❛ The body cannot live without the mind. ❜
❛ Unfortunately, no one can be told what it is. You have to see it for yourself. ❜
❛ That is the sound of inevitability… It is the sound of your death. ❜
❛ You’re looking for it. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. ❜
❛ The answer is out there, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to. ❜
❛ Do you think that’s air you’re breathing now? ❜
❛ Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger? ❜
