Noam Chomsky Quotes

Sustainable development: Meeting present needs without compromising the stock of natural resources remaining for future generations. In terms of buildings, it implies resource efficiency, minimum energy use, flexibility and long life

Pro-active good governance aims beyond short-term requirement keeping in mind the long-term needs such as the use of clean technology and in preparedness and mitigating climate change fallout etc.

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

What if we're wrong and there is no climate change? Well, by doing everything possible to address it, we will still use less water, stimulate new energy savings and, in time, money-saving technologies, enjoy cleaner air, and preserve more forests and trees and animals.

If we can go some way to creating a vibrant anaerobic digestion industry here in the U.K., we will be reaching our goals both in terms of economics and the environment.

You can pregrow a village with no consequence on the land. In fact, with a positive carbon contribution.

Make no mistake: business forces, if used long-sightedly, are the tools for leveraging new consumer behaviors, new and smarter ways of production, and for accelerating the transition to a sustainable world.

When we realize we can make a buck cleaning up the environment, it will be done!

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

We only have this one planet; we got to figure out how to live on it without destroying it.

Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done. ...With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation.

I understand it's seductive to use green technologies, for people who want to believe it. But it is a hoax in the sense that it's nothing more than another of the never-ending issues, political issues by the left, by the Democrat Party, to advance their ultimate agenda of bigger and bigger government and more and more control.

I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age.

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.

No one can predict whether the earth will be cooler or hotter next year, let alone do anything to change it. If you're afraid of global warming, turn off the lights when you leave the room - but don't participate in the corruption of science, don't scare our kids with unproven cataclysmic theories, and don't try to ban economic energy sources that people living on this planet depend upon today. And don't try to stop progress; it's the only hope the earth has of seeing clean industry, short of exterminating mankind.

The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution

We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume

What is more important for the world right now than preserving ways of living in balance with the earth?

If you're asking me do we want clean air and clean water? Yes. Do we want a safer climate for future generations of the world? Of course we want that. We're working super hard here in Trump Tower to make sure that happens.

Trees and clean energy [are] the long-run solution but we have no time to wait for the long run. We need a short-run solution now, and one that encourages and facilitates the transition to the long-run solution.

We could never light another match, and if China continues to build one coal-fired power plant a week, we are doomed. China is going to have to have new technologies made available to it to stop this. They're not going to live in poverty.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities.

Reaching a general understanding that sustainability is the ultimate issue will finally bring us face-to-face with the political challenge of forging a sustainable society during the next few decades. It is a challenge we can meet if we have the leadership and the political will to do so.