Barry Commoner Quotes

I think we can lower our emissions. I think the world will be better off if we did that, and we can do it without cap and trade.

Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.

There are some that feel like human activity is the cause for carbon emissions, and because of that, we need to revert to where we were in the 1870s for carbon emissions. I just choose to disagree with that.

We are already witnessing a transformation in the U.S. economy to increased production of lower carbon energy through fuel switching to natural gas and expansion of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable non-carbon intensive energy sources.

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 must reduce the emissions 100 percent. In Venezuela, the emissions are currently insignificant compared to the emissions of the developed countries.

Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.

Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don't spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don't get diluted.

Putting a tax on carbon could be an effective approach for curbing global warming pollution.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

If Britain was to close down altogether overnight, then China would take up the slack of carbon emissions in two years. If America closed down, just the growth in China's emissions would replace America's emissions in 12 years.

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

For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.

Opponents of cap and trade should be careful what they wish for.

Well, I'm not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.

Cuts in carbon emissions would mean significantly higher electricity prices. We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama's EPA.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

The cheapest, cleanest, nonemitting power plant in the world is the one you don’t build.

The market does not work in energy...Carbon has to have a value. Today in the U.S. and China it has no value

We should tax what we burn, not what we earn.

We need a crash program to decarbonize the economy, a big ask, but nothing less will save us.

When we agreed to the changes in the emissions standards and the objectives for 2025 with President Obama, there was a very clear road map that was put in place that required a midterm review, which should have been completed by 2017 and '18.

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.