William McDonough Quotes

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

If we become better with carbon capture technology, I think we can start a global trend toward carbon awareness.

We don't believe carbon capture is a proven, scalable, commercially available technology.

The enthusiasm around carbon capture and sequestration was probably greater before the shale-gas discovery and the low prices were so prevalent.

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.

Tax what you burn not what you earn.

Carbon is probably a bit harder to wrap since it's procedural.

A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.

A cap and trade system would put some kind of price on the carbon footprint.

[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.

The market does not work in energy...Carbon has to have a value. Today in the U.S. and China it has no value

The downsides of fossil fuels, notably their geopolitical and environmental risks, are not fully reflected in their market prices.

Coal is our country’s dirtiest energy source, from mining to burning to disposing of coal waste…. Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology…. Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

We should tax what we burn, not what we earn.

To achieve policy stability and certainty, we need to establish a meaningful price on carbon and cut the billions of dollars spent each year on fossil-fuel subsidies, along with well-structured financial tools and rules.

I say just put a big fat tax on carbon.

If carbon came out of the ground, it has to go back into the ground.

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.

New York and Connecticut belong to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to cut carbon emissions, and New York City has been a leader in energy efficiency.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

Energy consumption matters both to our environment and our economy.

Recently though, our State Governments have discussed instigating a carbon trading scheme - the details are still to be decided - and that's an encouraging sign.