Michio Kaku Quotes

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.

The problem with cap-and-trade and programs such as carbon capture and storage is that they all assume that business as usual can continue. The financial meltdown and peak oil has pretty much demonstrated that business as usual's not going to work.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet.

The planet's environmental woes tend to be overlooked as we scramble for the latest high-tech gizmos - and conveniently ignore their energy consumption.

Feeding our energy appetite is top of mind for many people these days.

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

This land, this water, this air, this planet - this is our legacy to our young.

The industrial stomach cannot live without coal; industry is a carbonivorous animal and must have its proper food.

Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

If you had no new technology, and you powered society as we do today - mostly by fossil fuels - you'd have only two choices: 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.

We can't continue to take from our planet the way we do and not give anything back, and the idea of, 'Oh, but it's fine, I won't have to deal with it in my lifetime,' well, you need to think about the future generations who will have to deal with it.

I had a very clear vision. If Indians start consuming power like the Americans, the world will run out of resources. Either you stop India from developing, or you find some alternate solution.

I think about the world that we leave behind for our children.

We gotta leave a better planet for our kids. And I would say we gotta leave better kids for our planet as well.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

Most people - including business leaders - want a healthy future for their children.