Alex Steffen Quotes

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

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.

As investments and as an energy source, fossil fuels have nowhere to go but down.

The question of energy is an important one. The big issue is how to get it, how not to destroy the environment, and how to survive as a species. It's a big deal.

There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.

I have to have faith that we're going to succeed in transforming where we get our energy from. The big worry is whether or not we're going to do it before it's too late. And I think nobody knows the answer to that.

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

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

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

[Coal is] a 19th-century fuel very badly suited for the 21st century. There's no way you can wash or scrub coal to make that essential fact go away.

Why would we build a thousand mile pipeline taking almost a million barrels of oil from the most carbon intensive fuel source on the planet when wind energy is a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot cleaner.

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.

Fracking locks the U.K. into an industry that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to renewables.

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.

The Age of Oil has really exhausted its usefulness, and it has actually become a danger to our lives and our ability to survive on the planet.

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

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.

Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases.

People say they are inventing electric cars. Well, where is the electricity coming from? Flowers? Maybe someday. But what is available now is oil and gas.

Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?

I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'

We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.

If we want to address global warming, along with the other environmental problems associated with our continued rush to burn our precious fossil fuels as quickly as possible, we must learn to use our resources more wisely, kick our addiction, and quickly start turning to sources of energy that have fewer negative impacts.