Margaret Beckett Quotes

Fighting climate change isn't just an obligation we owe to future generations. It's also an opportunity to improve public health - and drive economic growth - in the here and now.

Business as usual is dead. Green growth is the answer to both our climate and economic problems

If we don't embrace a low carbon economy this decade, it won't just harm the planet, but also the U.S. economy.

To be able to transform societies and economies to low-carbon ones was an amazing challenge. To influence and to facilitate such an important transformation in the world would be like witnessing something of industrial revolution proportions.

I hold a vision of this blue green planet, safe and in balance. At the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, we are emerging to a new reality. We are ready to make the next leap - as momentous as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote.

Our mission is, in truth, historic and world changing - to build, over the next fifty years and beyond, a global low carbon economy. And it is not overdramatic to say that the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure up to this challenge

I think politics today is all about false choices: You can have a robust energy economy and a challenged environment, or a great environment and no economy. That's a false choice. You can do both.

The low carbon economy is at the leading edge of a structural shift now taking place globally.

Every time we try to do something to improve the environment someone predicts that it will ruin the economy.

We, as a country, have always used innovative technology to advance environmental stewardship, reduction of those pollutants, but also grown our economy at the same time.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

The higher the stakes, the more responsible we have to be. It was with this in mind that I began to build my Green Economy and Climate Agenda.

Simply put, the low-carbon economy is better for growth.

I agree on the need for environmental sustainability. It is no good raising gross national income while at the same time destroying natural assets.

Let's work together to make our economies strong and our climate sustainable. It can be done.

With the economy and the environment situated as two pillars of the country's growth, my administration will make the utmost effort to achieve a green society.

There is no high-carbon future

In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously

Cutting carbon in the supply chain is the next critical stage in the business contribution to reduce carbon emissions to tackle climate change and, represents a significant commercial opportunity.

I like to think of climate action as a three-legged stool.

One thing that Barack Obama promised, one thing that we all know we must do is evolve our industry and our technology to being green and sustainable. We need to move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which I think spell doom for human society.

Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth

If you say the world is totally dependent on oil in many parts of the world, coal and certainly natural gas, we are fossil fuel, that is modernity, modernity has two elements: individualism and oil. Now to move toward a more enlightened sustainable world, we have to transform with lots of technology, with even differences in the way we see the world and how we live in the world. That's going to take decades.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

I'm going to be focused on doing everything I possibly can to help solve the climate crisis.