Rick Smolan Quotes

Well, air-conditioning is not a good thing.

As heat rises, so does the number of people trying to cool down homes, schools, hospitals and businesses. This isn't just about comfort; it's a matter of public health.

There's a way of getting heat that works for you, and there's a way of getting heat that works against you.

I grew up in northern California, where it was consistently in the hundreds in the summertime. My dad didn't think he should have to turn on the air conditioning when we had a swimming pool in our backyard; it was our built-in air conditioner.

One action society needs to take is to use energy much more efficiently. Instead of incandescent light bulbs, you could switch to LEDs that consume a lot less electricity, for example.

In this age of globalization, instant real time media and television, everyone all over the world realizes that high energy usage equates with a high standard of living and wealth.

All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors.

The manufacture and running of all the world's computers, the toxicity of the hardware mountains that we currently dump on other countries; all this can be totted up on the environmental account of web-users and its authors.

The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second.

The communities and countries best at using energy to optimize a microclimate for human life are also the ones whose people have the longest average lifespans. Canada, Sweden, and Iceland - places with inhospitable winter weather - are frontrunners in sustaining human health and life.

The LED light bulb is more than ten times the efficiency of regular incandescent lighting, so it can save the world hundreds of billions of dollars in electricity costs.

While I was designing my home, I was living in different houses all around the world, and I saw thermostats that were just as bad as the ones in the U.S., or houses that needed them but didn't have them. I realised that this was a worldwide problem. I thought, 'Let's fix it.'

When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content.

Too often, the air conditioners we use to cool down also contribute to climate change - the very force that's fueling extreme heat.

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

The first wave of the Internet was really about data transport. And we didn't worry much about how much power we were consuming, how much cooling requirements were needed in the data centers, how big the data center is in terms of real estate. Those were almost afterthoughts.

Our chips keep getting faster, and our data rates keep climbing, but at the end of the day - or worse, by mid-afternoon - those power meters on our screens inevitably turn to red.

When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house... but we never used it.

I had a very clear vision. If Indians start consuming power like the Americans, the world will run out of resources. Either you stop India from developing, or you find some alternate solution.

Performance matters because games are built on great performance, but form factor and energy efficiency matter incredibly because they want to build something that's portable and transformable.

Amory Lovins has said that the only reason Americans look efficient is that each has 300 energy slaves. Those 300 energy slaves will now be reproduced among the elite of India.

By electrifying our lives, we reduce our energy costs by 39 percent, which is a huge savings in itself.

It's energy intensification, where we essentially have, through our light bulbs and cars, the manpower of [hundreds of] people working on our behalf, helping our food being created, helping our materials like steel and plastic and wood and paper be created. Our lifestyles are incredibly energy intense.

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.

If we were all to reduce our demands for energy, it would make an enormous amount of difference.