Tony Blair Quotes

China leads the world in energy consumption, carbon emissions, and the release of major air and water pollutants, and the environmental impact is felt both regionally and globally.

Energy consumption matters both to our environment and our economy.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

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.

I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.

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

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

Electric cars aren't pollution-free; they have to get their energy from somewhere.

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.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be the impact of energy on the environment.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

This is the kind of balance people expect: both environment and the economy - not one or the other.

Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.

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.

We actually all care about the environment, and most people believe in climate change and believe that mankind has something to do with that - how much is scientifically debatable, but there is some effect and we all have an interest in reducing carbon emissions, just having cleaner air, cleaner oceans. It's something we can get behind.

If you're serious about climate targets, you don't build and expand the oil sands and move from coal-fired electricity to inefficient fracked gas.

A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.

There is no plan today to fully give up on coal. Experts point out that our supplies run for another 200 years, and it would be hard not to use them.

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

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

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?

We are on track for a 3.5 deg C rise by 2040 (i.e. 4.2 deg C relative to pre-industrial)... When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius, which would have devastating consequences for the planet. We have 5 years to change the energy system, or have it changed

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.