Timothy Geithner Quotes

Climate change is not just about carbon dioxide levels and melting polar ice caps. It is about our public health and protecting our Earth for future generations.

Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Human beings are just animals who will just eat and take advantage of any source of energy until it runs out, and then there'll be catastrophe.

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Climate change is a complex problem with no central lever, and with unequal distribution of resources.

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.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Life and families and babies are all joyous gifts. But if we do not begin to truly account for our numbers, we will surely create an ecological crisis that will only lead to anguish and despair.

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.

The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

We're busily wrecking the chances for future generations at a rapid rate of knots by not recognizing the damage we're doing to the natural environment, bearing in mind that this is the only planet that we know has any life on it.

Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on Earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all.

The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it's all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?