T. Boone Pickens Quotes

Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.

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?'

The tar sands boom has become the world's largest energy project, the world's largest construction project, and the world's largest capital project.

We oppose any pipeline whose sole purpose is to export bitumen from Canada to make profits in other countries.

The oilsands will be phased out by 2030 or 2035.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.

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.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

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.

Oil has allowed us to think about economics as though energy doesn't matter.

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways.

We've gone from thinking the fuels that powered our growth were inexpensive, inexhaustible and benign to understanding they are exhaustible, expensive and toxic. Once you frame the problem that way, people will look at solutions differently.

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.

If we drill the hell out of everything, including protected public lands and fragile regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America can emerge as an 'energy superpower.'

Why would even I say we can't stop drilling in the Gulf? Because we have no alternatives. Whether or not we drill in the Gulf, or in Alaska, we will continue to wring the last out of anyplace else.

From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems.

Hydraulic fracking is very much a necessary part of the future of natural gas.

Tar sands oil is the dirtiest fuel on Earth. Because producing it consumes so much energy, a gallon of tar sands crude generates 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventional crude oil.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.

Despite its many critics, hydraulic fracturing will change the nature of energy production.

What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.

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