Quotes & Sayings About Carbon

The surviving intelligent life form on Earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. — Paul MacCready

That's the problem with all of this. No matter how hard I try, I can't make it perfect. I can't keep it in a bottle, can't ignore reality. Chemicals are involved, the kind scientists try to synthesize and put into pill form, and they're making tremendous advances every day. They're winning the war against love. It's probably inevitable now. There are only two ways to see the world: either no one and nothing is connected to anything, or we are all a random series of carbon molecules connected to each other. Tell me if there's room for love in either of those scenarios. — Pete Wentz

Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. — Michele Bachmann

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other — Jeffrey D. Sachs

The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem. — William McDonough

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. — Jeanette Winterson

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration. — Michael Pollan

I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit. — Dennis Potter

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. — Margaret Atwood

Calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Change those rules of our universe just a bit, and the conditions for our existence disappear! — Stephen Hawking

Those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification. It's pure guesswork. — Henrik Svensmark

We could have a greener economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules - whether it's by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I'm not sure what - but in the end there's just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we're consuming. — Michael Pollan

The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren. — James Hansen

I don't fear fracking. I fear carbon — Russell Gold

If substantial methyl hydrate melt begins to occur in the Arctic Ocean basin, then the (carbon) accelerator will be jammed, and there will be nothing we can do to cut the speed of climate change. — Mark Lynas

Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary. — David Suzuki

The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions and that means low cost and high volume. We will also serve as an example to the auto industry, proving that the technology really works and customers want to buy electric vehicles. — Elon Musk

The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off. — Joel Salatin

Why didn't you tell me there was a smoking hot carbon copy of you? — Kimberly Lauren

Our carbon emissions have to eventually go to zero. We have to. Otherwise we're never going to have a stable climate and that's what our goal is for human civilization to thrive, a stable climate. We don't want one that's hotter, we don't want one that's colder, we want one that's stable. — Katharine Hayhoe

Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet. — Joel Salatin

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life - the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids - is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air. — Michael Pollan

Society has to get a grip and put a tax on carbon. Of course, there is much that flows from that, and it is a complex situation. The small details of something such as climate change are political and social, and they are a lot about fairness and how we rebalance towards a fairer society. — Richard Rogers

The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents. That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning. — Sylvia Earle

The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants - preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil. — Gregory Benford

Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty. — Ramez Naam

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans back into the atmosphere. Without this slow speed carbon cycle, Earth's temperatures would cool dozens of degrees below your comfort zone. — Seth Shostak

Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax. — Stewart Brand

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited ... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while. — Bill Gates

Each day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other. — Haruki Murakami

It's not a matter of if economies around the world becoming low-carbon, but when and how: through struggle and strife or through advancement and progressive leadership. Larry Elliot described it today as the 'Green New Deal.' It's a leadership we in Britain can provide, and from which our economy can benefit. — Lucy Powell

Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar. — William McDonough

Someday you will die somehow and something's gonna steal your carbon. — Modest Mouse

I know that nuclear is better than fossil fuels when it comes to carbon dioxide, but nuclear energy is by no means clean. We don't know what to do with the waste we already have and it seems like a bad idea to me to make more when we have so many cleaner options such as wind and solar. — Sheryl Crow

[W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so. — John Christy

carbon-based bipedal — Douglas Adams

Anything to do with any new form of tax, like consumption tax in Japan, carbon tax in Australia, these are big issues that cannot be easily decided. — Najib Razak

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all. — Timothy Noah

The policies being promoted are insane ... If you believe energy poverty is a good thing, you should support controls on carbon emissions. But most of the world disagrees with that. — Myron Ebell

The first demonstration of the law of conservation of energy was not by a physicist but by a medical man. He demonstrated with rats. If you burn food you can find out how much heat is generated. If you then feed the same amount of food to rats it is converted, with oxygen, into carbon dioxide, in the same way as in burning. When you measure the energy in each case you find out that living creatures do exactly the same as non-living creatures. The law for conservation of energy is as true for life as for other phenomena. Incidentally, — Richard Feynman

If climate change issues are not adequately addressed - if we keep running those nice energy subsidies, if the price on carbon is not adequately set, if policymakers don't have it on their radar screens - then financial stability in the medium and long-term is clearly at stake. — Christine Lagarde

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very good, — Newt Gingrich

China's energy is very much focused on coal, and the economy is very focused on heavy industry, which is carbon intensive, so restructuring won't be easy. — Ma Jun

C'mon kids! Wake up and smell the CO2! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president's office, or storm in on the next meeting of your college's board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon neutral. — Thomas Friedman

It's the fish I feel sorry for, in all this global warming. They don't even have a carbon footprint. — J.L. Merrow

When I'm talking about a developing world, I also look at clean-water access - women who are more vulnerable to sexual violence when they're fetching water. And talking about what we have going on here, with our carbon footprints and our emissions, is just as important to me as figuring out how to provide clean water to people who need it in regions around the world. — Sophia Bush

I can be a better me than anyone can; I am me. Good or bad. I am myself. I'm no carbon copy of no one else. — Diana Ross

Even if we stop the growth, we'd still be adding a constant amount of fossil carbon to the atmosphere each year. — William H. Calvin

The poster boy for our superabled future is Oscar Pistorius, an increasingly famous South African sprinter who happens to have had both of his legs amputated below the knee. Using upside down question mark-shaped carbon fiber sprinting prosthetics, called Cheetah blades, Mr. Pistorius can challenge the fastest sprinters in the world. — Daniel H. Wilson

I am aware that for decades there has been exploration of options and concrete plans and investments being made to look at life on another planet. We must not stop exploring. At the same time let's preserve and enhance the life we already have on earth. Join the green revolution, plant trees, stop soil erosion, reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere and promote recycling of waste. Become aware, create awareness, act responsibly and lead by example. — Archibald Marwizi

I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas. — Olivia De Havilland

You can't say British Columbia's carbon tax is exactly the same as increasing hydroelectricity rates in another province. They're very different mechanisms, but we shouldn't deny that both of them can have an impact, and that's why we're talking about this broadly. — Christy Clark

Only forest fires produce more black carbon than bunker fuel. Bunker fuel can have a sulfur content of up to 45,000 parts per million (ppm). Low-sulfur diesel for cars is supposed to contain 10 ppm. The sulfur is converted into acid — Rose George

Unless we decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within just a few years from now, our destinies will already be chosen and our path towards hell unalterable as the carbon cycle feedbacks ... kick in one after another. — Mark Lynas

With today's work, I'm about one-fourth of the way through the whole cut. At least, one-fourth of the way through the drilling. Then I'll have 759 little chunks to chisel out. And I'm not sure how well carbon composite is going to take that. But NASA'll do it a thousand times back on Earth and tell me the best way to get it done. — Andy Weir

Carbon dioxide is unusual because it doesn't go through the usual three phases of matter, from solid to liquid to gas, but it goes straight from solid to gas. The volume of the gas is much greater than the volume of the solid. When a solid turns into a gas, we say it sublimes. The process is sublimation. — Robert Winston

Detailed scientific arguments by the authors present a serious challenge to the expositors of the Copernican Principle (that man is merely an impure lump of carbon crawling about on the surface of an insignificant speck of cosmic dust). — David Medved

Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.' — Sam Kean

A lot of lies and misinformation has been put about by eco nuts on the back of a report by an idiot economist [Sir Nicholas Stern]. Environmental head bangers are talking nonsense when they claim that aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions. Coal-fired and oil-fired power stations are the biggest contributor of carbon but I have yet to hear any fearless eco warriors advocating nuclear power as they drive around in their SUVs to their next protest meeting. — Michael O'Leary

Carbon dioxide does not cause or contribute to smog, and the Kyoto treaty would do nothing to reduce or prevent smog. — Stephen Harper

Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up. — Annalee Newitz

Putting a tax on carbon could be an effective approach for curbing global warming pollution. — Frances Beinecke

Our climate leadership team has recommended it go up and I would say there's always going to be upward pressure to raise the carbon tax. Remember, we're already double what the only other province who has a carbon tax is at right now, Quebec - they peg it at about $15 a tonne. — Christy Clark

Enlightened self-interest from those involved in hydrocarbons should lead to the support of technologies enabling the clean use of hydrocarbons, such as carbon capture and storage, and not to the defence of deniers and cranks. — Nicholas Stern

He figures she must contain a carbon core. A soul as hard as a diamond. So what happens when a diamond finally breaks? — Blake Crouch

If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging
which ends up on the garbage dump anyway
and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty. — Carlo Petrini

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. — Gregory Benford

I love being a carbon molecule. — Duncan Trussell

Southam's research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who'd injected children with hepatitis and others who'd poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam's study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists' fears, the ethical crackdown didn't slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. — Rebecca Skloot

We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a remote past in a dying star. The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres moulded our metabolism. — George Wald

Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight. — Thom Hartmann

The coal plants that will be built from 2005 to 2030 will release as much carbon dioxide as all of the coal burned since the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago. — Joseph J. Romm

And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it? — William McDonough

Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls. — Bob Weir

Dead isn't angels or ghosts. It's a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body
so that they can return to their most elemental stage. — Jodi Picoult

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax us citizens for our carbon footprints. — John Coleman

This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere. — Naomi Klein

[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at first amused myself with making experiments on the fixed air [carbon dioxide] which I found ready made in the process of fermentation . When I removed from that house I was under the necessity of making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind. — Joseph Priestley

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax. — Nina Easton

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius. — Michael Pollan

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the world that crosses carbon cycle tipping points that quickly take us to 1000 ppm, is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees — Joseph J. Romm

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of "green" human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet. — Naomi Klein

The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree. — Neill Blomkamp

In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, great progress was made in the study of the intermediary reactions by which sugar is anaerobically fermented to lactic acid or to ethanol and carbon dioxide. — Hans Adolf Krebs

While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations. — Newton Lee

Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life. — Elias James Corey

Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind, what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? ... To such questions no answers can be found in the laboratory.'23 — John C. Lennox

Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane. — Jay Inslee

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation. — Bjorn Lomborg

Worldwide, our oceans are warming, rising, and becoming dangerously acidic as a result of carbon pollution and climate change - endangering much that we hold dear. — Sheldon Whitehouse

Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. — D.H. Lawrence

Technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream. — Herman Koch

The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago through forensic geology and carbon dating. Most of the images found in their religious stories and ceremonies are depicted in these caves. We also have confirmation from the aborigines themselves that these images are their religious images. These paintings also are likely to be significant evidence for linking the use of Amanita Muscaria to its use 50,000 years ago. This is because 50,000 years ago was when humanity entered Australia and also because Amanita Muscaria produces religious like experiences. — Leviak B. Kelly

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis] — George Wald

We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction. — Rob Nixon

Physicists say we are made of stardust. Intergalactic debris and far-flung atoms, shards of carbon nanomatter rounded up by gravity to circle the sun. As atoms pass through an eternal revolving door of possible form, energy and mass dance in fluid relationship. We are stardust, we are man, we are thought. We are story. — Glenda Burgess

You see, the Greenhouse Effect is a direct result of burning fossil or old carbon fuels. — Jack Herer

I have not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. — Pat Robertson

Kestrel took Arin's battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith's coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained.
She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before. — Marie Rutkoski