Milton Friedman Quotes

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.

Too often we think about the green economy as an elite market niche, one in which affluent people spend more money to consume greener and cleaner products.

We've lost touch and allowed technology to take precedence over organic nature. But let's not forget that those microchips in our computers came from elements of the earth.

You can listen to them [environmental protesters] but don’t stop your project—don’t stop your thinking.

It may be a hundred-year battle to turn around our industries and finally get everyone living on sustainable energy with technology that can keep our lives comfortable. If that's the case, the first 20 years of the shift have actually done a lot to support that. But there's still a long way to go, and judging by the state of the environment, we don't have that kind of time.

In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren't worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don't have a clue what they're doing.

With the world's human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can't control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.

Governments at all levels and the whole society should act more vigorously to protect the land our lives depend on.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.

Conservation is not without a cost.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

… work [jobs] and the environment should not be played off against each other.

The mature Anthropocene begins when we acquire the ability to live sustainably and become a lasting presence on this world.

I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.

We must not risk defunding environmental conservation programs, which is why Congress should reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund to preserve our natural resources.

The old rules may say we can’t protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we’ve always used new technologies - we’ve used science; we’ve used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.

I fear for the future of the planet. But in a funny way, I'm even sanguine about that.

Pro-active good governance aims beyond short-term requirement keeping in mind the long-term needs such as the use of clean technology and in preparedness and mitigating climate change fallout etc.

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done. ...With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation.

The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.

We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume

When it comes to the environment and global warming from emissions, it has to be dealt with in one of two ways - preemptive regulations, which I don't agree with, or with private property principles. Nobody has the right to pollute their neighbors' air or water or land.

If we want to move towards a low-polluting, sustainable society, we need to get consumers to think about their purchases.

You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don't call it global warming anymore. It's weather control.