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Fossil Fuels Quotes

Browse 22 quotes about Fossil Fuels.

Fossil Fuels Quotes

“The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.”

ScienceEvilCrimeCivilizationInnovationGreedClimate ChangeGlobal WarmingSad TruthFossil Fuels
Author:Michael E. Mann
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“Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.”

Global WarmingElectricityRenewable EnergyClean EnergyClimate CrisisBook Of PoemsOil IndustryRenewable Energy SourcesFossil FuelsElectric Cars
Book:Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth
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“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”

EnvironmentEmploymentTexasSlogansEnvironmentalismMississippiLouisianaAlabamaPolitical CampaignAnti IntellectualismArabs2008Fossil FuelsRocky MountainsUnited States SenateDeepwater Horizon Oil SpillPetroleum IndustryNewt GingrichRepublican Party UsArctic National Wildlife RefugeDrilling RigsMitch McconnellOil Wells2008 In United States2008 RncAnti ArabismDrill Baby DrillMay 2008Natural Gas PricesOffshore DrillingOffshore Oil Gas In UsOil PlatformsOil RigsRepublican National ConventionShale GasShalesUs Offshore Drilling Debate
Author:Naomi Klein
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“We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.”

Industrial RevolutionClimate CrisisKleptocracyFossil Fuels
Book:On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
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“I am not sure that energy company executives who say they want to understand the concerns of Indigenous people can actually do so unless they can grasp the emotional weight and social obligations carried by people who balance on the knife-edge of permanent cultural loss.”

Climate ChangeSustainabilityReciprocityOil And GasIndigenous PeoplesCultural IdentityFossil FuelsLumbee Indians
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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“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.”

ConservationCoalGasolineFossil Fuels
Book:Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
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“It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people seem to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately to catastrophe: what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out. It has fallen to us, centuries later, to bear witness to the last turn of the wheel. And what we are seeing already -' he paused to point a finger in the direction of the distant wildfires - 'should be enough to remind us that the climatic perturbations of the Little Ice Age were trivial compared to what is in store for us now. What our ancestors experienced is but a pale foreshadowing of what the future holds!”

Climate ChangeFossil FuelsLittle Ice Age
Book:Gun Island
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“Couldn't it be said that it was in the seventeenth century that we started down the path that has brought us to where we are now? After all, it was then that Londoners began to use coal on a large scale, for heating, which was how our dependence on fossil fuels started. Would your Jacobean playwrights have written as they did if they hadn't had coal fires to warm them? Did they know that an angry beast, which had long lain dormant within the earth, was coming to life? Did Hobbes or Leibniz or any of the other thinkers of the Enlightenment have any understanding of this?”

EnlightenmentCoalFossil Fuels
Book:Gun Island
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“Quiero señalar otra cuestión importante sobre las 29.404 muertes del año 2013. El clima ya no es una de las principales causas de mortalidad, gracias sobre todo a los combustibles fósiles. En cambio, todavía hay mil trescientos millones de personas que viven sin electricidad y una gran mayoría de ellas sufrirán una muerte prematura, un problema que sólo podría resolverse usando más combustibles fósiles. No sólo estamos ignorando la cuestión de conjunto cuando convertimos el cambio climático en la obsesión de nuestra cultura, sino además nos hemos propuesto «combatir» ese cambio climático rechazando el arma que ha reducido su peligrosidad de manera espectacular. (...) No hemos recibido un clima seguro y lo hemos transformado en algo peligroso; hemos recibido un clima peligroso y lo hemos convertido en mucho más seguro. La civilización de la energía, y no la metereología, es el eje impulsor de la habitabilidad climática. Pase lo que pase, el clima siempre será peligroso por su propia naturaleza, y la pregunta clave siempre será si poseemos la capacidad de lidiar con él o, mejor aún, si somos capaces de dominarlo.”

ClimateClimate ChangeFossil Fuels
Book:The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
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“[...] obtenir la baisse de notre dépendance aux combustibles fossiles demande de la méthode et de la gestion, et non une croyance aveugle dans des objets techniques particuliers qui seraient nécessairement adaptés partout et tout le temps.”

EnergyEnvironmentClimate ChangeSustainabilitySustainable DevelopmentFossil FuelsChangement Climatique
Book:Transition énergétique pour tous : Ce que les politiques n'osent pas vous dire
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“[I]f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period’s prejudices.”

Climate ChangeFossil Fuels
Book:No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies
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“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”

Climate ChangeCoalNuclear EnergyFossil Fuels
Book:Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future
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“But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)”

BuddhismOilGenocideEssaysEnvironmentalismInterconnectednessFossil FuelsTar SandsBest Buddhist Writing Of 2011Imperial Oil
Author:Melvin McLeod (editor)
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“Along with the rest of the environmental movement, I used the expression 'climate emergency', but over the past year of elm-watching, I've realised emergencies are events that require immediate, drastic, high-paced intervention, designed to bring the situation to an end. Climate action just isn't like that and I no longer believe the emergency metaphor is helpful: it implies that the problem will be short-lived, that experts will be able to handle it and that we should be in a state of heightened emotion, in 'fight-or-flight' mode, until help arrives. It makes many people so upset that they're understandably immobilised or frozen with fear, or too distressed to be rational. In reality we all need to engage deeply and long term, in cool, life-affirming ways. I believe recovery or healing is a better way of thinking about the issue: getting off our fossil fuel addiction, restoring our damaged relationship with the rest of the natural world and trasforming to healthier ways of being.”

Climate ChangeNatural WorldLife AffirmingClimate ActionFossil FuelsClimate EmergencyEnvironmental Movement
Book:The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them
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