Barack Obama Quotes

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.

The current challenge facing the environmental authorities is how to properly deal with the environmental problems caused by economic development.

China may achieve its goal of reducing the carbon intensity of its economy (the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of output) by 45 percent below its 2005 level by 2020. But the country is growing so fast that its coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are expected to continue to increase. China is expected to add the equivalent of a new 500-megawatt coal-fired electric plant every 10 days for the next decade...

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.

Climate change is real and humans do contribute to those changes.

There's this thing that you're not meant to have too many children - for global warming, it's bad. But I know lots of crappy people, and I would rather that good people have lots of kids and outnumber the baddies.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

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.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

The combination of population growth and the growth in consumption is a danger that we are not prepared for and something we will need global co-operation on.

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

It has been acknowledged for many years the current level of human population growth is unsustainable and places acute pressure on global resources. Human activity is exacerbating global warming, and higher population levels inevitably mean higher emissions and more climate change victims.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

We actually all care about the environment, and most people believe in climate change and believe that mankind has something to do with that - how much is scientifically debatable, but there is some effect and we all have an interest in reducing carbon emissions, just having cleaner air, cleaner oceans. It's something we can get behind.

If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.

Climate change is the biggest threat to our chances of winning the fight against hunger.

You can't just do one of the things, because it won't be enough to combat the climate change that we're already starting to experience. It will only get worse.

Climate change has always been sort of my main focus. I think also with [what happened in Fukushima, Japan] there's still a lot to think about in terms of what's coming down the pike into the world's oceans, too.

Climate change is real and it is caused to a significant extent by human activity.

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return

Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security.

The hard truth is carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades now. And even if we Americans do our part, the planet will slowly keep warming for some time to come.