Politics & Power Quote by Donella Meadows

Meadows swings a scalpel at denialism by framing climate change not as a mystery but as a social sorting mechanism: who’s willing to accept causality, and who isn’t. The line “Everyone except…” is doing more than picking a fight with the GOP’s far right. It establishes a moral majority and casts rejection of fossil-fuel causation as willful ignorance rather than a legitimate disagreement. That’s a classic Meadows move: systems thinking turned into blunt politics. If the system’s feedback loops are clear, then the remaining obstacle isn’t information, it’s incentive.

Her specificity matters. “Oil, gas and coal burning” refuses the comforting abstraction of “human activity.” It names an industry and, by extension, the lattice of subsidies, lobbying, and cultural identity that protects it. The list of impacts (“bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos”) is a rhetorical drumbeat: disaster as receipt. She’s also collapsing scientific nuance into public language; El Nino isn’t caused by fossil fuels in a simple on/off way, but a warming baseline can amplify volatility. The point isn’t a peer-reviewed footnote. It’s to make the causal chain emotionally legible.

Context sharpens the edge. Meadows, best known for The Limits to Growth, spent her career explaining why complex systems punish denial with delayed, outsized consequences. Coming from an environmentalist rather than a partisan operative, the jab reads less like campaign rhetoric and more like exasperation from someone watching society ignore the dashboard lights. The subtext: the climate debate is over; the power struggle starts where the science ends.