James Woolsey Quotes

We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

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

I am a true believer that we have to change the way we generate and consume energy in the United States.

Here in the United States we're now consuming about three gallons of petroleum per person per day. That's twenty pounds of oil per person per day. We only consume about four pounds of oxygen per person per day. We're consuming five times more oil each day, here in the United States than we are oxygen. We've become the oil tribe.

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.

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

Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.

It's fine if you're making 1,000 or 2,000 of an electric car, and I think there is value in that in a lot of ways, but it's not going to have a big dent in oil consumption in the country, or CO2 emissions.

We need to face it, as a nation we have a reliance on petroleum.

Energy consumption matters both to our environment and our economy.

It is very possible to have lives that are just as prosperous, and nicer, that use 5 percent of the fossil fuels and virgin materials we do now. But if we're living anything like the average McMansion-ite, SUV-driving suburbanites, there's simply no way that can be powered in a climate-friendly way.

When people switch to car-sharing from car ownership, they reduce their vehicle miles traveled by 44 percent, and thus their greenhouse gas emissions go down by, like, 40 percent.

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

I find it interesting that many of the people who want to restrict fossil fuels live in well-developed countries where abundant and affordable energy is readily available.

Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars.

People don't want to give up their SUVs. They don't want to turn the thermostat down in the winter and up in the summer.

We consume about 25 percent of the world's oil every year, but we only have reserves, including that which has not been pumped, of about 3 percent of the oil reserves in the world.

And almost half of American oil consumption is for motor vehicles.

The forces that are in play on climate change essentially revolve around the generation of power, the transportation of goods and services and people, and the sorts of materials that we use to fuel the whole of our civilisation.

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

Feeding our energy appetite is top of mind for many people these days.

With 3 percent of the world's resources and 25 percent of the world's demand, it is pretty obvious this country cannot drill its way to energy security.

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.