Michio Kaku Quotes

Even if we didn't have greenhouse gases, were going to have to move away from fossil fuels, as we're going to run out. They're finite, whereas solar and wind are infinite.

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

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

Look, natural gas, just like oil, is going to eventually go away. It's not renewable.

We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy.

We need to move away from oil, period.

Civilization as we know it could not continue to exist without oil.

Just as the stone age did not end for lack of stones, the oil age will not end because of a scarcity of oil.

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.

A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

We couldn't go to the moon on whale oil. We don't have the capacity yet to consider doing such things as harnessing current sunlight. We're burning ancient sunlight in order to get us to where we now are. But it's costly.

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

Moving to 100 percent renewable energy means we no longer need and can no longer justify wars for oil.

I'm glad you asked. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.

The other piece of this is that we call for cutting our bloated and dangerous military budget. And this is something that is made possible by moving to 100% clean renewable energy, where we cannot justify wars for oil, and where we cannot justify having some 700, 800 bases gathered around the world in something like 100 countries in significant measure protecting either access to fossil fuels or protecting routes of transportation.

Scientists had said, "If you keep burning coal and gas and oil, you will melt the Arctic." And then the Arctic melted just as they had predicted. Did Shell Oil look at the melt and say, "Huh, maybe we should go into the solar-panel business instead?" No, Shell Oil looked at that and said, "Oh, well, now that it's melted it will be easier to drill for more oil up there." That's enough to make you doubt about the big brain being a good adaptation.

The fuel in the earth will be exhausted in a thousand or more years, and its mineral wealth, but man will find substitutes for these in the winds, the waves, the sun's heat, and so forth.

Society's dependence on fossil fuels is jeopardising social and economic progress.

You can have a strong economy or you can help the environment, but you can't do both at the same time. That's ridiculous. In fact, as a sustainable vision for a healthy economy has to involve changing our energy policy and changing with respect to the natural world. Because we're hitting nature's thresholds, we're hitting nature's limits with respect to water and crop yields and energy use and fossil fuels heating the atmosphere at the same time we're past global peak and running out of that.

The Age of Oil has really exhausted its usefulness, and it has actually become a danger to our lives and our ability to survive on the planet.

Oil is dead, on its way to extinction.

The interesting thing is the field is so big - it's enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.

Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth .

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.