Tatiana Schlossberg

“Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.”

“About 6,000 years ago, St. Paul Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Bering Sea, must have been a strange place. Hundreds of miles away from the mainland, it was uninhabited except for a few species of small mammals, like arctic foxes, and one big one: woolly mammoths.”

“As a nation, we spent eight billion hours sitting in our cars, waiting for lights to change, for the driver ahead to sneak into that parking spot, for an accident to be cleared.”

“During fire season and heat waves, power can go out or electric utilities may shut off power to avoid sparking fires or creating systemwide blackouts, both of which mean that hospitals have to run on their generators.”

“Ice cores, which are long cylinders scientists extract from glaciers, ice sheets or ice caps, contain gas bubbles, pollen, dust particles, or chemical isotopes that give scientists clues about what Earth's temperature and atmosphere were like when the ice caps first formed.”

“I learned about coal ash, which is the byproduct of burning coal for electricity. It is one of the largest solid industrial waste streams in the country, and it contains harmful substances like arsenic, lead, mercury and more, and because of how it is stored, pollutes groundwater and drinking water all over the country.”

“President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law, created 18 monuments, including the Grand Canyon and Olympic National Park in Washington, totaling more than a million acres.”

“If there's one vital, but underappreciated, subject in the conversation about climate change, it's waste: how to define it, how to create less of it, how to deal with it without adding more pollution to the planet or the atmosphere.”

“In the stable emissions model, in which a rise in global surface temperatures by two degrees Celsius from preindustrial times is more than likely, the Northeast would still see a robust increase in nitrogen loading.”

“Climate change is not a distant problem. It's involved in all of our lives through the stuff that we use, buy and eat - which is not to say that individuals like you and me are responsible for climate change.”

“In the Garden of Eden, figuring out what to wear was easy and the fig leaves were environmentally friendly. Today, it's much harder to find clothes that don't have some kind of negative impact on the planet.”

“Humpback whales - which can be as long as 60 feet, weigh as much as 40 tons and can live for 50 years - are found in all of the world's oceans.”

“Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites, more than any other county in the United States. All of them were designated as such in the mid to late 1980s, and most were contaminated by toxic chemicals involved in making computer parts. Completely cleaning up these chemicals may be impossible.”

“Extreme precipitation is likely to increase with rising temperatures because of growing atmospheric humidity, leading to a higher risk of flash flooding nationwide.”

“Most viscose rayon is made from wood pulp, but the process of making it typically uses so many chemicals in such vast quantities that some experts said it shouldn't really count as a natural plant fiber.”

“The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.”

“Coal is used to generate power almost everywhere, but problems associated with coal ash and coal ash slurry disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, experts say.”

“Air quality is already a problem outside of cars: More than 80 percent of people living in cities where pollution is tracked are exposed to air quality levels below World Health Organization limits.”

“When there is this dip in the jet stream that brings cold to the East, there's usually a countervailing loop that takes warm air into Alaska or the Arctic.”

“Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.”