Leonardo Maugeri Quotes

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

The United States is the biggest spender of oil and of all the planet resources. Oil is a very valuable resource for life - electric heaters. We must have to transition ourselves to a post-oil era.

We don't have all the time in the world with oil. We have to use oil while it makes sense to do so.

Look, natural gas, just like oil, is going to eventually go away. It's not renewable.

Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

The country remains dependent on oil. But as we are now learning, oil is becoming increasingly scarce.

It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.

In the United States you use more oil than water. Water takes a few days to recycle. Oil takes 4 million years.

Civilization as we know it could not continue to exist without oil.

The substitute of oil for coal is impossible because oil does not exist in this world in sufficient quantities.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

We should not cling to crude down to the last drop - we should leave oil before it leaves us.

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.

We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.

The very energy sources that have gotten us to where we are now are also, if we continue doing what we're doing, a shortcut to the end of all that we hold near and dear.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.

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.

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

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

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.

We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy.

As much as with increased exploration new gas reserves can be found, what must be obvious to all is that our oil and gas reserves are not renewable and they are diminishing, and to protect the generations to come, we must engage in nothing short of a radical shift in the diversification of the economy.