Barry Gardiner Quotes

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

There is no plan today to fully give up on coal. Experts point out that our supplies run for another 200 years, and it would be hard not to use them.

Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

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.

Ending our reliance on fossil fuels was never going to be easy.

We have to be reminded that we still live in a world that relies a lot on fossil fuels, and that transition to new and renewable sources is not always and in all cases possible from one day to the next.

We cannot afford to burn the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves.

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.

It's not possible to solve the climate crisis while we continue to expand fracking.

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.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good - it just needs to be clean energy.

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

Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?

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.

If we want to address global warming, along with the other environmental problems associated with our continued rush to burn our precious fossil fuels as quickly as possible, we must learn to use our resources more wisely, kick our addiction, and quickly start turning to sources of energy that have fewer negative impacts.

We've gone from thinking the fuels that powered our growth were inexpensive, inexhaustible and benign to understanding they are exhaustible, expensive and toxic. Once you frame the problem that way, people will look at solutions differently.

There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.

What we've got is the wholesale embrace of fracking domestically, internationally and for export. And this couldn't be further from what we really need to do to address climate change.

It seems the EPA has worked hard to devise new regulations that are designed to eliminate coal mining, coal burning, usage of coal.

I find it interesting that many of the people who want to restrict fossil fuels live in well-developed countries where abundant and affordable energy is readily available.

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.

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