Quotes & Sayings About Fossil Fuels

I ask citizens and governments everywhere to do their part by conserving energy and reducing the use of fossil fuels for the good of the world community. This is our duty to those who share this world with us and to those who follow us: Wherever we see a threat to our environment we must take action — Arnold Schwarzenegger

We need to stop using fossil fuels as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the two leading replacements of wind and solar have emerging health and environmental problems. — Steven Magee

Under pressure from a growing movement of people who want their money out of fossil fuels, universities, pension investors and foundations are looking to exclude coal, oil and gas stocks from their portfolios. — Frances Beinecke

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

If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels. — James Lovelock

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

I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?' — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Man is the biggest threat to Earth. We gut the planet of its fossil fuels then turn those same fuels against the planet through global warming... The world's glaciers are losing as much as six feet of ice cover per annum, that's half a million square miles in the Arctic Ocean alone in the past thirty years. — Eoin Colfer

I think that the world is in the middle of a huge transition that we have to make to renewable energy. We have to transition away from fossil fuels very, very quickly. — Josh Fox

The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish — Tom Robbins

We must proceed with our own energy development. Exploitation of domestic petroleum and natural gas potentialities, along with nuclear, solar, geothermal, and non-fossil fuels is vital. We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil. — Gerald R. Ford

Even if we didn't have greenhouse gases, were going to have to move away from fossil fuels, as we're going to run out. They're finite, whereas solar and wind are infinite. — Ted Turner

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

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. — Carl Sagan

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

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

CO2 is a minor player in the total system, and human CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to total natural greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, lowering human CO2 emissions will have no measurable effect on climate, and continued CO2 emissions will have little or no effect on future temperature ... While controlling CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels may have some beneficial effects on air quality, it will have no measurable effect on climate, but great detrimental effects on the economy and our standard of living. — Jonathan Duhamel

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

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

People in all walks of life, and especially business, do not want to experience the collapse of cities like New York along with global finance and economy in chaos, but this is what business faces if we continue to attribute climate change to fossil fuels alone. — Allan Savory

re: the US agriculture industry: " This puts us in the odd position of consuming fossil fuels --geologically one of the rarest and most useful resources ever discovered-- to provide a substitute for dirt --the cheapest and most widely available agricultural input imaginable. — David R. Montgomery

Since 1850, burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas has increased 100 times to produce energy as the world has industrialized to serve the world's more than 6 billion and growing population. — John Olver

Our close cousins the gorillas and orangs and chimps and gibbon apes have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than two hundred years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

The earth is warming at an alarming rate, we are running out of fossil fuels, and it is long past time for us to take action to correct these problems. — William J. Clinton

The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels - the essence of the Greens' theory of global warming - has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. — Paul Johnson

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution. — Jeff Goodell

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there. — Dan Simmons

They had known that it would happen. Yet they had not prevented it. Their world had been overused, abused, their forests logged, their precious fossil fuels wasted, their rich obscenely wealthy, their poor reduced to beggary. They had been powerful enough to put up the satellites, they had plated the landscape with their roads, crisscrossed it with their machines. And now where were they? — Kerry Greenwood

You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads. — James Hansen

Nuclear power and fossil fuels are the choices of the past. Renewable energy is the choice of the future that is here today. — Hermann Scheer

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it. — James Hansen

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

I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources which do not generate the heat that is currently provided by fossil fuels. I concur that climate change is beginning to [have an] effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action. — Mitt Romney

In America, they think that you become more powerful the more magic you use."
"Just like fossil fuels." Penny glances over at me, then snorts.
"Don't look so surprised," I say. "I know about fossil fuels. — Rainbow Rowell

There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we're causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations. — Thom Hartmann

Within 25 years, virtual reality meetings will be essentially transparent to being there in person. Once we can do this, the idea of climbing into an aircraft, and burning up huge quantities of fossil fuels to propel our bodies and briefcases full of papers, will seem absolutely backward. — Burt Rutan

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 issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we're contributing to the warming of the earth's atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return. And unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels and chart a new course on energy in this country, we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe. — Barack Obama

Climate change is severely impacting the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants, and we must transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels. — Leonardo DiCaprio

For people who currently have to burn fossil fuels to produce meager, polluting light, LED lighting is a game changer. — Shuji Nakamura

Fossil fuels and mining is a short-term gambit. If we develop those resources at the expense of the environmental gold mine that is the Great Barrier Reef, we will all lose in the long run. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

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

Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable. — Maurice Strong

One SF prediction that I would like very much to see: Get solar collectors launched to beam energy back home, and get away from fossil fuels. — Jack McDevitt

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

In reality, Republicans have long been at war with clean energy. They have ridiculed investments in solar and wind power, bashed energy-efficiency standards, attacked state moves to promote renewable energy and championed laws that would enshrine taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels while stripping them from wind and solar. — Jeff Goodell

I'm passionate about restoring the efficacy of American democracy, making capitalism sustainable, prioritizing advances in technology, and seizing the opportunities to use that kind of innovation to help usher in a new economy that doesn't rely on carbon-spewing fossil fuels. — Al Gore

There is no doubt there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It should have an effect on the climate, but the numbers indicate that effect is relatively minor. — John Christy

Fossil fuels, including oil, are running out and supplies are getting harder to find. If we do nothing, prices will continue to rise and our reliance on oil will come to an abrupt and tumultuous end, causing global economic and social turmoil. — Lucy Powell

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation. — Rowan Williams

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

They will also tell you how far along we are along the depletion curve; the optimists among them will even claim that there is nothing to worry about, because we have two or three decades of production left at the current level. It is to be expected that we will run out of fossil fuels before we run out of optimists, who are, along with fools and madmen, a renewable resource. — Dmitry Orlov

The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050. — Gwynne Dyer

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

Either you abandon fossil fuels, or you find a way to get that carbon back. — Klaus Lackner

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

We are launching a campaign called Wind, Not War, which is about the alternatives to a fossil-fuels-based economy and looking at wind, an alternative energy, as key to that in terms of issues of global climate change as well as issues of democracy. — Winona LaDuke

The burning of fossil fuels has altered the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so rapidly and so abundantly that now, we are driving not just the warming trend, not just the sea level rise that is a consequence of the warming trend that is melting polar ice and alpine ice, but also [ocean acidification]. — Sylvia Earle

I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies. — Paul Krugman

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on. — Ramez Naam

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

Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence. — Naomi Klein

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity. — Dan Lipinski

One of my top priorities in Congress is to reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. — Lincoln Diaz-Balart

The single thought that can empower us to empower the world: Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous-because the human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life. — Alex Epstein

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

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

For decades, NRDC has created and supported policies that will ultimately end our reliance on fossil fuels. — Frances Beinecke

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

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

Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters! — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost. — Chris Paine

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

So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes. — Thom Hartmann

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand. — Jeff Goodell

Many anti-energy groups display little appreciation of the extent to which modern economies depend pervasively on the use of fossil fuels and petrochemical products. — Robert Higgs

THIS book is radioactive. And so are you. Unless you are dead, in which case we can tell how long ago you died by how much of your radioactivity is left. That's what radiocarbon dating is - the measurement of the reduction of radioactivity of old bones to deduce the time of death. Alcohol is radioactive too - at least the kind we drink. Rubbing alcohol usually isn't, unless it was made organically - that is, from wood. In fact, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tests wine, gin, whiskey, and vodka for radioactivity. A fifth of whiskey must emit at least 400 beta rays every minute or the drink is considered unfit for human consumption. Biofuels are radioactive. Fossil fuels are not. Of those killed by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the best estimate is that fewer than 2% died of radiation-induced cancer. These statements are all true. They are not even disputed, at least by experts. Yet they surprise most people. — Richard A. Muller

We need an energy revolution by breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, polluting fuels ... I am very, very confident our small state will lead this. We will be noticed by the country and the world. — Bernie Sanders

The high prices also highlight the fact that the U.S. is too heavily dependent on fossil fuels that we import from unstable parts of the world. To protect our national security, we must become more energy secure. — Dan Lipinski

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

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 has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. — James Hansen

An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking - and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels - which we possess in staggering abundance - that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live. — Charles Krauthammer

Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. — Amory Lovins

It's going to cost trillions of dollars to rework the energy sources all over the world. Were going to have to move away from fossil fuels. — Ted Turner

Fossil fuels will run out not because of limited resources but because of the environmental impact. If I can solve that impact, I have basically increased the resource base by a vast amount. — Klaus Lackner

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

People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks. — Anonymous

Fossil fuels are merely a part of the "natural capital" which we steadfastly insist on treating as expendable, as if it were income, and by no means the most important part. If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself. — Ernst F. Schumacher

Plants have to eat, too," I tried to explain. "They need nitrogen, they need minerals. You have to replace what you're taking out. Your choices are fossil fuels or animal products. — Lierre Keith

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them. — James Hansen

Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat — Elizabeth Kolbert