Paul Davies Quotes

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

I think developed countries - so-called developed countries - should reflect upon the way of living and the waste of energy.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

You only have to ask yourself, "What would happen if the entire population of India and China had two-car garages and were living at the technological and the economic standard that the American middle class is today?" The planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

We all think Al Gore invented email so we could save time and save paper, to save trees. And that includes phone trees.

When you start traveling and thinking from a global perspective, you realize how small the planet is and how predatory we are to its ecology.

Nostalgia has become so much more popular because technology and climate change are visibly present. It's easy to idolize the past, before those things were prevalent.

My idea with '4 Degrees' was to articulate, for a minute, not my ideal vision of how I wanted to perceive my relationship to nature but the reality. If I could give a voice to my behavior, what would that voice be? Taking planes, enjoying first-world fossil fuel, an addict of first-world comfort.

Science and technology are the keys to both our longevity and our demise. Our entire existence on this planet is a double-edged sword.

We promote new fossil fuel infrastructure, from airport expansion and coal mines in the U.K. to oil pipelines in the U.S. Investments are meant to build and secure our shared future - but all these fossil fuel investments are directly fuelling the climate crisis that threatens to undermine that future.

There are too many people, that's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff.

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.

I used so much hairspray that I feel personally responsible for global warming!

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects.

Without a doubt, the warming of the past 100 years has been a welcome respite from a long and deadly Little Ice Age. The possibility that humans may have contributed to the recent warming does not make it any less welcome.