Ivan Illich Quotes

Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world's population.

We need a proportional quantitative understanding of energy use, for everyone.

All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors.

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.

Most of us working on poverty alleviation simply want to know, 'How much poverty can I reduce for every dollar I donate?'

It's time to stop obsessing about overhead and start focusing on progress. Change charity, and charity can change the world.

You're not going to solve the problems of poverty in the world with less energy.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

A citizen of an advanced industrialized nation consumes in six months the energy and raw materials that have to last the citizen of a developing country his entire lifetime.

Society's dependence on fossil fuels is jeopardising social and economic progress.

Far from being a drag on growth, making our energy sources more sustainable, our energy consumption more efficient, and our economy more resilient to energy price shocks - those things are a vital part of the growth and wealth that we need

I remember Secretary of State [George] Shultz one day saying that America is an economic model for the world. I replied to him that America represents 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 30 percent of the world's energy. What if everyone in the world lives like Americans? Where do we get the energy for this standard of living?

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would require very large transfers of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, so that the entire world can make the transition to renewable forms of energy as fast as possible.

I have to tell you with regards to global warming that that's something, which, you're right, the scientists haven't entirely resolved, but no question about one thing, it's getting warmer, and a lot of good reasons for us to use less energy, to use it more efficiently and to develop sources here in this country that could allow us to be more independent of foreign sources.

Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.

While our energy efficiency is improving, there is a very high correlation, almost near perfect correlation, between GDP growth, and energy usage.

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.

Microfinance recognizes that poor people are remarkable reservoirs of energy and knowledge

But while I'm realistic about our challenges, I'm optimistic about our future. There are a few things, and if we do them, we're going to have the greatest era in our history. And I have detailed what those things are specifically.

Many analysts now regard modest, zero, or negative growth in our rate of energy use as a realistic long-term goal.

Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.

Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.