Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

Important reserves of natural resources, like petroleum and precious metals, are the bulwarks for laying the foundations for the future.

People are getting richer all over the world and they are going to want to live the way Americans live. And that is going to place a big strain on our environment and will be a great challenge.

People mean well. But there is an unintended consequence of giving people bigger recycling bins and more opportunities to recycle—soon they want to recycle everything.

Ultimately, I love everything about making games, but I've come to hate everything about conventional sustainability, and I know I'm not alone.

If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production, you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can't have that device without everything that goes with it.

I want consumers to connect the dots, to go to any store and look at the label and connect the dots between buying cheap China products, which is better for the wallet, and all the other things we lose, like jobs.

Customers want good value, but they care more than ever how food and clothing products are made.

When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.

The ethos of most films is that you make a film, you exploit the community, you exploit the environment, and it's OK because you made a great film, you know?

Fashion is capitalism, and it will be fixed by what the market demands.

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

For a Canadian, natural resources were a good fit.

When a country wants television more than they want clean water, they've lost their grip.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.

Everyone wants new things all the time; shops require so much - there has to be consistency.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

Proponents of efficiency standards argue that they save consumers and businesses money, reduce energy use, and reduce emissions. But families and businesses already understand how energy costs impact their lives and make decisions accordingly.

We prefer synthetic rather than natural materials. Natural products are almost too valuable. Wood is much harder to produce than metal. And metal is recyclable, while wood isn't.

What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.

We must protect our limited resources for those who are truly in need and who are doing all they can to be self-sufficient.

I actually believe 'Sustainability', as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it's this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multibillion dollar industry.

Sometimes I worry about the amount of paper I waste.

It's amazing people get so detached from what they eat and what they wear. No one has any contact with how things are made that are put in their body and put in their mouths and I just find it alarming that no one questions it.

I love beautiful things; I like having nice clothes, and I can appreciate why other people do - but I've also started to learn more about the impact of what we buy: how things are made, how much you buy and the quality of everything.