Environment Quotes

"We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy. It's just not in usable form yet."

"It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now."

"It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature."

"Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance."

"To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior."

"Far from environmental prophet, he is a foreign oil profiteer. That is the inconvenient truth of Al Gore."

"All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people."

"In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it's for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again."

"In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn."

"There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly."

"Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent - a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice - that struggle continues."

"The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage."

"I have a private plane. But I fly commercial when I go to environmental conferences."

"More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance."

"Environmental problems cannot be resolved here the way they are resolved in other countries. I heard that 80 per cent of the environmental problems in the U.S. are solved in court. That can't happen here."

"If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it."

"I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

"The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die."

"There are a tremendous amount of environmental issues that are on the table."

"Good environmental policy is good economic policy."

"When I look at China's environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money. It's lack of motivation."

"There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities."

"We don't value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems."

"Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we're going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty."

"Even the government understands that the environmental challenge is so big that no single agency can handle it. It needs collaboration among all the stakeholders - companies, governments, NGOs and the public. Public accountability will be the ultimate driving force."

"The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution."

"Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse."

"Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things."

"Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related."

"I've used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I've still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth."

"I see a future where states compete with one another to see which can be the most efficient, and where businesses seek out efficient states in which to locate so they can reap the economic and environmental benefits for their businesses and employees."

"The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it."

"Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance."

"If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn't be here. It'd still be waiting for an environmental impact statement."

"I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future."

"All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies."

"My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons."

"In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards."

"Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment."

"The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it."

"Environmental pollution, terrorism, and many other global threats do not stop at borders. We all bear global responsibility and thus need a global identity to enable us to cope with them. We must learn to integrate different levels of identity in ourselves. What matters is not either/or, but both/and."

"If we want to address global warming, along with the other environmental problems associated with our continued rush to burn our precious fossil fuels as quickly as possible, we must learn to use our resources more wisely, kick our addiction, and quickly start turning to sources of energy that have fewer negative impacts."

"Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it."

"I think the environmental problem will be the number one item on the agenda of the 21st century... This is a problem that cannot be postponed."

"A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic."

"And secondly, I would impose a significant state landfill tipping fee and use that tipping fee to fund the billion dollar bond issue that I want to create to produce the funds for all of the environmental challenges that we just went over."

"This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact."

"By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth."

"The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities."

"What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are."