Vandana Shiva Quotes

Coal, oil and natural gas have lit homes and powered machinery for centuries, driving civilization forward. But as human development accelerated, the unsustainability of such energy became apparent.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

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

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective.

You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways.

When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen.

Since 1850, burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas has increased 100 times to produce energy as the world has industrialized to serve the world's more than 6 billion and growing population.

We've gone from thinking the fuels that powered our growth were inexpensive, inexhaustible and benign to understanding they are exhaustible, expensive and toxic. Once you frame the problem that way, people will look at solutions differently.

I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time.

Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don't spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don't get diluted.

If Britain was to close down altogether overnight, then China would take up the slack of carbon emissions in two years. If America closed down, just the growth in China's emissions would replace America's emissions in 12 years.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

The 'environmental left' tells us that, though we have natural resources like natural gas and oil and coal, and though we can feed the world, we should keep those things in the ground, put up fences, and be about prohibition.

The squandering of oil and gas is associated with one of the greatest tragedies, not in the least resolved, which is suffered by humankind: climate change.

We should not only look at the short-term economic benefits of fossil fuels but also at the bad news for climate change. We should therefore not greet the fossil fuel age unconditionally.

Fracking locks the U.K. into an industry that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to renewables.