Wendell Berry Quotes

We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

Look, natural gas, just like oil, is going to eventually go away. It's not renewable.

We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy.

I would like to help people have honest and constructive conversations about energy. We need to understand how much energy our modern lifestyles use, decide how much energy we would like to use in the future, and choose where we will get that energy from.

The total amount of energy we use every year - from coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and everything else - is dwarfed by the amount of solar energy hitting the planet each year.

Historically, countries have made big energy shifts only when confronted with acute fossil-fuel crises: oil embargoes, debilitating pollution, or wars.

Even if the economy crashes, we will still burn oil.

Renewable energy is not more expensive than fossil fuel when you factor in life-cycle costs.

In New York, lights are on the whole night; there are offices where not a single person is working, but all lights are on. The street lights at the White House are lit all the day. Why? And we are being told not to use coal.

Nuclear power, once regarded as petroleum's natural heir, has become less and less attractive as its numerous drawbacks come to light. Coal, the other fossil fuel, is ultimately as exhaustible as oil.

Oil production should peak out around the world in the early 1990s...That means in five years' time we may have chewed up most of the possibility of further expansion of oil production.

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.

We consume about 25 percent of the world's oil. We only have 2 percent of the reserves.

We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before.

During the 1960s, we used twice as much oil as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.

I think the business community knows that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the scramble for what remains.

The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

The 20th century was the time when the world turned to use of fossil fuels and the 21st century will be the century of the renewables.

Ours is the most wasteful nation on Earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan, and Sweden.

I believe in an "all of the above" energy strategy.

While sabotaging our reliable energy sources, Obama is also throwing as much federal money as he can at failed green energy projects, which are so ill-conceived that a reasonable person might conclude this goal is to waste money. Solyndra wasn't the only such failed enterprise, as we've shown. There were a dozen others, and despite these failures and the unconscionable waste, he has revealed nothing but a defiant determination to double down and spend more on other such projects. It's mind-blowing.

The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.