Frederick Soddy Quotes

Electricity is derived from many non-renewable energy sources like oil, natural gas and coal.

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.

Nearly all of our existing power sources are generators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, and gas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and even our nuclear fission utility power plants.

The two great agents of the physical world have become subject to the will of man and have been made subservient to his wants and enjoyments; I allude to steam and electricity, under whatever name the latter may be called.

Since 1850, burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas has increased 100 times to produce energy as the world has industrialized to serve the world's more than 6 billion and growing population.

When the Industrial Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting underneath Britain in the form of coal was as big as the amount of carbon sitting under Saudi Arabia in the form of oil, and this carbon powered the Industrial Revolution, it put the 'Great' in Great Britain, and led to Britain's temporary world domination.

Once you have extrapolated the effects a particular science will have on society - cheap clean energy, rejuvenation - the political impact is quite easy to predict. The two are twinned.

Thirty percent of the Nation's energy comes off the gulf coast.

Chinese growth will either be strong or very strong. They have a voracious demand for energy that will only continue to grow. What they're doing... is looking at all forms of energy. They're going ahead very strongly with coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas.

You can’t mine coal with bayonets!

We need to develop clean, affordable, and reliable energy sources, and frankly, we need to license that technology to the rest of the world.

I have heard somewhere an argument that if the Industrial Revolution - economic development - had started in Africa rather than Europe, then sun and wave technology would now be at the forefront, not the old fossil fuels.

Exceptional circumstances can accelerate the gradual process of energy transitions: France's decision to develop nuclear energy on a grand scale is perhaps the best example of how that can be done by government fiat. In contrast, America's accelerated shift from coal has been driven by an inevitable embrace of cheaper natural gas.

Of course we have to use coal... the renewable energy sources will supplement the supply from coal.

We have more natural resources - coal, oil, wind - across the board not only to be energy independent but to be a leading exporter.

There has been great excitement at the prospect that this atomic bomb or atomic energy is likely to produce great industrial energy very quickly, I do not believe it at all.

The history of man is dominated by, and reflects, the amount of available energy

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

We need to invest in all energy sources, including coal and shale.

When the natural gas industry was knocking on my door, they were knocking on the door of millions of people. And that became something that Americans really needed to focus on.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.

The next big invention that will change the way we live should be things like ways of generating energy like electricity.

It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.