Andrew Nikiforuk Quotes

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be the impact of energy on the environment.

I had a very clear vision. If Indians start consuming power like the Americans, the world will run out of resources. Either you stop India from developing, or you find some alternate solution.

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.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

Global fuel and consumption, however, is projected to increase by 100 to 150 percent over the next 20 years, driven largely by the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies; and this growth and this increase in demand will force prices even higher.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

Energy consumption matters both to our environment and our economy.

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.

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.

Our society, our culture - the greatness of America - goes hand-in-hand with energy, and our leaders need to wake up. We need energy, OK?

The problem is not the oil, but what they do with the oil. The United States is the biggest spender of oil and of all the planet resources.

We also know that China and India, as their economies ramp up, are using more and more energy.

The industrial stomach cannot live without coal; industry is a carbonivorous animal and must have its proper food.

We will run out of air long before we run out of oil.

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

Look at climate change; don't put your head in the sand. Understand that it is going to have profound effects on our resources and so much else.

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

The squandering of oil and gas is associated with one of the greatest tragedies, not in the least resolved, which is suffered by humankind: climate change.

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.

Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.

Coal, oil and natural gas have lit homes and powered machinery for centuries, driving civilization forward. But as human development accelerated, the unsustainability of such energy became apparent.

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.