Alex Steffen Quotes

Job creation is a choice. Investing in cleaner, greener technologies that allow us to strike a more sustainable balance with the other living systems of this earth - this, too, is a choice.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.

Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.

I, Maggie, personally cannot tell you that you're going to save the planet. But what I do know is that we can draw a line to an issue that can conserve what we already have and what's left in a way that we can actually breathe the air, drink the water, actually grow things in soil - that matters in a real, practical way.

I think its time to change and balance the environment and growth. If we don't do that, we're going to suffer a hard landing one day very soon.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

The Government needs to recognise that we live on a planet with finite resources - and start measuring our progress as a society by the quality of our lives, not the expansion of our GDP.

We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.

We need a greening of globalisation.

We can survive as a population only if we conserve, develop sustainably, and protect the world's resources.

For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment.

Conservation of energy also protects our environment.

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.

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.

We've been given the gift of a billion years of cosmic time, and we should not screw it up. But at the rate we're using up our planet's natural resources and fouling our own nest means we're not going to last a billion years.

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

We cannot sustain long-term growth in our economies if we do not protect and preserve our environment.

Protecting our environment and natural resources is necessary for both our planet and our economy.

To be able to transform societies and economies to low-carbon ones was an amazing challenge. To influence and to facilitate such an important transformation in the world would be like witnessing something of industrial revolution proportions.

I agree on the need for environmental sustainability. It is no good raising gross national income while at the same time destroying natural assets.

Curbing pollution and global warming takes a global cooperative mindset. Development aid needs to be rethought in this context.

By far, the greatest contribution Ireland can make is to lead by example, by actively pursuing its own transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy.

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.