Paul Polman Quotes

At Unilever, we operate in 190 countries with two billion people using our products daily. We take climate seriously because we know that it impacts those two billion people - and that means it impacts us, too.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

It took a generation for companies to recognise their responsibilities in terms of labour practices and another generation for them to recognise their environmental obligations.

The problem of a rising population destroying more than four tons of soil for every human already alive needs to find its way into corporate board rooms if we are to enjoy future financial, economic and political stability.

I actually believe 'Sustainability', as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it's this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multibillion dollar industry.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

As consumers, we need to demand that companies sell us sustainable products that do not disregard and destroy our natural world.

A lot of U.S. businesses are really going into the agenda of sustainability, and some are making their own commitments in emissions reductions in their own operations.

It is not possible to have a strong, functioning business in a world of increasing inequality, poverty, and climate change.

If you are planning to save the planet, it will not be Tesla that will do it, since only a finite number of people can afford to buy one, even a $35,000 Model 3.

We have the enormous opportunity in our hands to make a positive difference for business, people, and the planet.

If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.

Climate change is real and humans do contribute to those changes.

There's this thing that you're not meant to have too many children - for global warming, it's bad. But I know lots of crappy people, and I would rather that good people have lots of kids and outnumber the baddies.

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources.

You can't just do one of the things, because it won't be enough to combat the climate change that we're already starting to experience. It will only get worse.

Climate change has always been sort of my main focus. I think also with [what happened in Fukushima, Japan] there's still a lot to think about in terms of what's coming down the pike into the world's oceans, too.

We could replace people with fossil fuels, have higher and higher levels of industrialization, of agriculture, of production, without thinking of the green-house gases we were admitting, and climate change is really the pollution of the engineering paradigm, when fossil fuels drove industrialism. To now offer that same mindset as a solution is to not take seriously what Einstein said: that you can't solve the problems by using the same mindset that caused them.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

Buy less, choose well, make it last. Quality rather than quantity: That is true sustainability. If people only bought beautiful things rather than rubbish, we wouldn't have climate change!

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return

Canada, at the moment, is going through a Lord of the Rings moment. Having been a lowly Hobbit with furry feet and fun parties, with fireworks and beer, it has now been handed the Ring of Power: a large supply of fossil fuel, in the form of oil/tar sand and coal. Will it shrivel into an evil RingWraith? Will it become an addicted Golum? Will it refuse the Ring, like Galadriel, fearful of what So Much Power (in both senses of the word) will do to its inner being? Will it try to deal with the Ring responsibly, like Gandalf? Will it side with the Ents?

Everybody needs to understand that policies are going to change to make it unprofitable if you wreck the planet, those companies that continue exploring and developing fossil fuel resources for which there is no safe use are going to pay a very heavy cost for that.

There is no business on a dead planet

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.