Richard Heinberg Quotes & Sayings

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. — Richard Heinberg

When we decline to talk about what is real simply because it's uncomfortable to do so, we seal our own fate. — Richard Heinberg

What's new is high oil prices and the economy hates high oil prices. — Richard Heinberg

If we aim for what is no longer possible, we will achieve only delusion and frustration. But if we aim for genuinely worthwhile goals that can be attained, then even if we have less energy at our command and fewer material goods available, we might nevertheless still increase our satisfaction in life. — Richard Heinberg

The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption. — Richard Heinberg

Nationalization of the economy will not constitute a solution to society's difficulties; it will merely be a reflexive means of averting immediate meltdown. — Richard Heinberg

The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century. — Richard Heinberg

Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems. — Richard Heinberg

Urbanization, the industrialization of food systems, and the building of highways may have contributed to GDP over the short term, but they have created societal vulnerability over the longer term. In a world of Peak Oil, scarce fresh water, unstable currencies, changing climate, and declining trade, true "development" may require implementation of policies at odds with - sometimes the very reverse of - those of recent decades. — Richard Heinberg

We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications. — Richard Heinberg

It is possible to point to hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and reuse - yet the overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged. — Richard Heinberg

As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda
the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government
in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society. — Richard Heinberg

The era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system — Richard Heinberg

The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we've reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life. — Richard Heinberg

The science is in: either we go cold turkey on our coal, oil, and gas addictions, or we risk raising the planet's temperature to a level incompatible with the continued existence of civilization. — Richard Heinberg

the existing market economy has no "stable" or "neutral" setting: there is only growth or contraction. — Richard Heinberg

All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That's why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That's also why we will probably hit the wall, and why the outcomes described in the previous chapters of this book are likely. The sustainability revolution will occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis. — Richard Heinberg

Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people. — Richard Heinberg

Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world. — Richard Heinberg

Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society. — Richard Heinberg

If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species. — Richard Heinberg

The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible. — Richard Heinberg

Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with. — Richard Heinberg

Today, it is especially difficult for most people to understand our perilous global energy situation precisely because it has never been more important to do so. — Richard Heinberg

the economic pain gripping the United States will not actually be the fault of immigrants - or China, Muslims, environmentalists, or even terrorists. Nor is the essential problem Big Government: As we have seen, the desperate effort to inflate government spending and power is more of an effect than a cause of the nation's predicament. — Richard Heinberg