Wendell Berry Quotes

I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.

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.

There is hardly an activity that a person can think about that does not intrinsically involve energy, most of which is currently provided by fossil fuels.

Just refrigerator efficiency saves more energy than all that we're generating from renewables, excluding hydroelectric power... I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is.

When I look at the many energy-using sectors - such as businesses, households, electricity generators, the transportation sector - I see that the business sector is the one which uses the energy efficiency potential the highest, because they know that using energy more efficiently will also reduce their costs.

The cheapest energy is the energy you don't use in the first place.

I have been working for years to promote a responsible energy policy that works to increase energy efficiency and invest in alternative and renewable energy sources.

We waste an awful lot of energy as a Nation through inefficient use of energy.

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

The State Energy Program, it provides grants to States and directs funding to State energy offices. The States use these grants to address their energy priorities, program funding to adopt emerging renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies.

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.

I think a lot about the Department of Energy. If I were the head of it, I would close it down.

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

Our vision is to have the Seoul citizens produce and efficiently consume energy.

We have seen the Democrat solution to an energy crisis; it's called California.

This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. 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.

Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time.

In so far as such developments utilise the natural energy running to waste, as in water power, they may be accounted as pure gain. But in so far as they consume the fuel resources of the globe they are very different. The one is like spending the interest on a legacy, and the other is like spending the legacy itself. ... [There is] a still hardly recognised coming energy problem.

Energy is an eternal delight.

Its operation in a world beset by fuel and energy crises makes no sense at all.

Some of our businesses use more energy than others, but our strategy everywhere is the same... first, reduce our use of energy as much as possible. Then, switch to renewable sources of power where it makes economic sense... And, over time, as a last resort, offset the emissions we can't avoid.

Dirty energy is a finite resource; the more of it we use, the scarcer it becomes.

Many analysts now regard modest, zero, or negative growth in our rate of energy use as a realistic long-term goal.

Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.