Fossil Fuel Quotes & Sayings

If we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky. — Barack Obama

It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts. — Mark Ruffalo

Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate? ... whatever the explanation may be, the Paraclete appears to be as determined as any terrestrial corporate frontman to prevent a successful conclusion to the climate talks. How I know? Because every time anyone gets together to try to prevent global climate breakdown, He swaths the rich, densely habited parts of the world with snow and ice, while leaving obscurer places to cook. — George Monbiot

The abundance that is offered to us by leaving behind the fossil fuel paradigm is very promising for the world and the people of the world. We will have cleaner air, water, and food; we will have more resources to share with our people. There will be more economic freedom because people will be able to harvest their own energy. — Mark Ruffalo

Rising carbon price is essential to 'decarbonize' the economy - to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels. — James Hansen

I hold a vision of this blue green planet, safe and in balance. At the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, we are emerging to a new reality. We are ready to make the next leap - as momentous as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote. — Elizabeth May

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that. — Bill McKibben

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence ... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Can you taste it Bruce? Can you taste the filth, the dirt, the oily blackness of that fossil fuel in our mouth as you choke and gag and spit it out? Do you still hear his voice in your head urging you to eat? Eat, eat eat. Your mother's cries. Do you hear them? You should be Bruce. Because I know that it's never left you alone. Now you can eat what you want to eat. For me, for you, for all the others. Now you can consume to your heart's content or your soul's destruction, whichever comes first. So eat. — Irvine Welsh

I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem. — Charlie Munger

We must get rid of fossil fuels by developing injection systems for automobiles, which can run on bio-fuel. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. — Wendell Berry

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable. — Wendell Berry

We need to profoundly revise all of our taxes and charges. The aim is to tax pollution - notably fossil fuels - more, and tax work less — Nicolas Sarkozy

The fossil reserves that have already been discovered exceed what can ever be safely used. Yet companies spend half a trillion dollars each year searching for more fuel. They should redirect this money toward developing clean energy solutions — Desmond Tutu

There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources. — Bill McKibben

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance. — Margaret Mead

I believe, along with Pope Francis and almost all scientists, that climate change is threatening this planet in horrendous ways, and that we have to be aggressive in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel and defeat the Keystone Pipeline. — Bernie Sanders

I like the analogy that the way that we live in Western Society, the energy that we consume in the form of fossil fuels, is the energy equivalent in pre-fossil fuel terms of having 500 slaves. — John Lindsay

I oppose the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It's an ill-conceived project that would lock us into further dependence on some of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet. — Elizabeth Warren

The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued. The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better able to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their communities. — Naomi Klein

There is a reason it is called fossil fuel-it is an outdated method of getting power. — Alexandra Paul

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways. — Sylvia Earle

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free — Bill McKibben

We need policy change, and the most important thing people can do is to contribute and participate in the political process. We have to vote climate change deniers and people who will create subsidies for the fossil fuel industry out of office. We have to protest when bad decisions are being made about fracking or tar sands. — Josh Fox

It will be nearly impossible to slow warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels. — Henry Sylvester Jacoby

We have already used more than half of that budget. This means that three quarters of the fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, and the fossil fuels we do use must be utilized sparingly and responsibly. — Christiana Figueres

A revolution in humanity's use of fossil fuel-based energy would be necessary sooner or later to sustain and to extend modern standards of living. It will be required sooner if we are to hold the risks of climate change to acceptable levels. The costs that we bear in making an early adjustment will bring forward, and reduce for future times, the costs of the inevitable eventual adjustment away from fossil fuels. — Ross Garnaut

You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't. — Elizabeth Kolbert

As long as a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, get equal time with hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, the public inevitably ends up with a misimpression about the state of our scientific understanding. — Joseph J. Romm

Nuclear power, once regarded as petroleum's natural heir, has become less and less attractive as its numerous drawbacks come to light. Coal, the other fossil fuel, is ultimately as exhaustible as oil. — Lester R. Brown

We can combat climate change effectively. What we are lacking now is not the brain power, not the knowledge, not the technology. What we are lacking is the political will power, and we need your help by the millions to tell Congress to stop worrying about their fossil fuel contributors to their campaigns and worry about their kids and grandchildren. — Bernie Sanders

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food. — Michael Pollan

If aliens did visit us, I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We of the richer societies, who have had access to more energy than we have the experience to wield intelligently are making decisions we are not qualified to make almost every time we enter the voting booth, go to the grocery store or step into a car show room. We do not know what is "normal." Because our whole life and in some respects a generation or two before us have only known this era of fossil fuel exploitation and resource grabbing; we call this normal. — Alfred W. Crosby

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return — Barack Obama

The fossil fuel industry for too long has shifted enormous costs of carbon pollution onto the public. — Bernie Sanders

Not using fossil fuels is tantamount to not using energy. It is economic suicide and eco-manslaughter. — Paul Driessen

We'd do better-if it were possible-just to eat the oil directly. For example, it takes 127 calories of fuel to fly in each calorie of iceberg lettuce from the United States to the UK. According to one estimate, the US food system consumes ten times more fossil energy than it produces in food energy. With — Mark Lynas

Subsidies for the oil, gas and coal industries are projected to cost taxpayers more than $135 billion in the coming decade. At a time when scientists tell us we need to reduce carbon pollution to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absurd to provide massive subsidies that pad fossil-fuel companies' already enormous profits. — Bernie Sanders

Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we're taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. — Jimmy Carter

In nature the only source of energy is from the sun. So in ecological systems everything comes from the sun through the process of photosynthesis whereas now in human built environment our source of energy is from fossil fuels, renewable, wood energy or hydro-energy but it is not from the sun. So until we are able to operate and run a human built environment by imitating photosynthesis it will be a long while before we can have a true eco-system. — Ken Yeang

Just 8% of the $409bn spent on fossil-fuel subsidies in 2010 went to the poorest 20% of the population. — Fatih Birol

It makes no sense to invest in [fossil fuel] companies that undermine our future — Desmond Tutu

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially. — Bill McKibben

Most reputable scientists agree that climate change is real and that the effects are likely to be bad. But nobody can say for sure exactly what 'bad' means. The safest and most equitable way out of this horrific mess is simple: cut fossil-fuel emissions. — Michael Specter

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump - a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. — Naomi Klein

We've got to alter our fossil fuel dependence and go to other energy sources. — Sylvia Earle

We're clearly coming to the end of the fossil fuel era. We have the technology to shift to renewable energy, we have the will of the people. The only thing that's keeping us back is the fossil fuel industry's hold on our political system. That's what we need to change. — Mark Ruffalo

Britain has squandered its windfall of natural resources from North Sea oil and gas. Instead of prudently investing the 'unearned income' from nature, to build a safe, clean and green energy supply for the nation, we face unnecessary shortages. But there is still a chance to put the proceeds from liquidating our fossil fuel assets to better and more appropriate use. Instead of oil companies profiteering from climate change and oil depletion, a windfall tax could establish an Oil Legacy Fund to pay for Britain's urgent transition to a sustainable, decentralised energy system — Andrew Simms

We'll always need energy. We need to communicate, too, but we're not stuck with hand gestures and smoke signals. There are better ways to power our future than by digging fossil fuel from the ground and setting it on fire. — Frances Beinecke

Fossil fuel corporations are supposed to pay the government fair market royalties in exchange for the right to drill on public lands or in federal waters. — Bernie Sanders

When we burn fossil fuel for energy we are, in qualitative terms, doing nothing more wrong than burning wood. Our wrongdoing, if that is an appropriate term, is taking energy from Gaia hundreds of times faster than it is naturally made available. We are sinning in a quantitative not a qualitative way. — James E. Lovelock

Today, wind is the cheapest energy in America; solar is not far behind. In time, fossil fuels will only get more and more expensive. — Mark Ruffalo

With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side. — Bill McKibben

Trees and soils can absorb carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. It would be great to subsidize responsible farmers and forest managers. — Alana Beard

if fossil fuel companies are going to help pay for the shift to renewable energy, and for the broader costs of a climate destabilized by their pollution, it will be because they are forced to do so by law. — Naomi Klein

No matter how advanced our economy might be, no matter how sophisticated our equipment becomes, for the foreseeable future we will still depend on fossil fuels. — George W. Bush

Trusting your energy policy to the fossil fuel lobby is like trusting your health care system to the tobacco lobby. — William H. Calvin

We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous. — David J. C. MacKay

Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy. — David Suzuki

It is a fact that, today, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. — Mark Ruffalo

These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives. — Bill McKibben

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned. — Michael Pollan

We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy. — Carlo Rubbia

Energy markets can be thought of as suffering from appendicitis due to fossil fuel subsidies. They need to be removed for a healthy energy economy. — Fatih Birol

When you think about the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books, the current fossil fuel companies, the last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War, — Chris Hayes

If [a student's] college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. — Bill McKibben

Burning fossil fuels is like breaking up the furniture to feed the fireplace because it's easier than going out to the woodpile. — Theodore Roosevelt

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. — Michael Pollan

Natural gas is a dirty fossil fuel like the rest of them. — Josh Fox

There's something about the awareness of the limits that makes you tune in more to your surroundings and I've experienced a lot of pleasure or even joy in working with those alternatives and also it's made me so much more aware of just how much work we can make those sources of supply do for us, whether it's electricity or fossil fuels. — John Lindsay

The fossil fuel industry commands outsize sway over U.S. politics, markets, and democracy. I knew these companies were formidable, but when I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, I got a close up view of how the industry disregards government safeguards. — Frances Beinecke

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable. — Josh Fox

In a sense, the fossil fuels are a onetime gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources. — Kenneth S. Deffeyes

No matter what else happens, this is the century in which we must learn to live without fossil fuel. — David Goodstein

The 1,230 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power generating capacity in place at the end of 2009 now constitutes just over 25 percent of total generating capacity worldwide. This is over three times nuclear generating capacity and roughly 38 percent of the capacity of fossil fuel-burning power plants worldwide. — Christopher Flavin

Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage
oop!
yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more. — Dave Eggers

We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps. — Russell Gold

We only gain collectively by acting now. We gain by one day not having to pay a thing for fuel. We gain by having cleaner air, water, and food so that we are healthier and our health care costs come down. We gain by deflating the global fossil fuel markets that drive much of the conflict around the world. — Mark Ruffalo

Every candidate running for president has got to answer the following very simple question: At a time when we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainability, should we continue to give $135 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade to fossil fuel companies? — Bernie Sanders

Apparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our oil and coal reserves. — Van Jones

If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled only by solar energy, let no one claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air-conditioning systems, and computers. This project voices our conviction that a pioneering spirit with political vision can together change society and bring about an end to fossil fuel dependency. — Bertrand Piccard

The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it — Adair Turner

Dreaming is the soul's fuel...and it is not fossil — Jennifer Jimenez

Where people aren't as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it's far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they're much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They're ready to go. — Bill McKibben

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s) — Bill McKibben

I am grateful to the fossil fuel industry for bringing us the concentrated carbon that took us through the Industrial Revolution and through the technological revolution and brought us to the gateway of the renewable energy revolution, or what I call the sunlight revolution. But that is where we must part ways. It's the natural order. — Mark Ruffalo

Unless a price can be put on carbon emissions that is high enough to force power companies and manufacturers to reduce their fossil-fuel use, there seems to be little chance of avoiding hugely damaging temperature increases — Rajendra K. Pachauri

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. — Jose Angel Gurria

The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia. — James Hansen

All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby. — Michael Pollan

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans - somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it's essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil. — Lierre Keith

It is a fact that many of the wars and conflicts happening all over the world are aggravated or fought strictly for geopolitical fossil fuel energy interests, and many of the world's most dangerous regimes are funded by fossil fuel dollars. — Mark Ruffalo

Will we confront climate change in time or will we let fossil fuel companies determine our fate? This is a fight we can't afford to lose, and that's what keeps me moving forward. — Frances Beinecke

Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels. — David Goodstein

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

Society's dependence on fossil fuels is jeopardising social and economic progress. — Ban Ki-moon

We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels — Richard Branson

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame. — Mark Ruffalo