Thomas Friedman Quotes

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

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.

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.

The United States is the biggest spender of oil and of all the planet resources. Oil is a very valuable resource for life - electric heaters. We must have to transition ourselves to a post-oil era.

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

As investments and as an energy source, fossil fuels have nowhere to go but down.

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.

We don't have all the time in the world with oil. We have to use oil while it makes sense to do so.

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.

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.

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.

Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

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.

Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?

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.

I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

Oil has allowed us to think about economics as though energy doesn't matter.

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

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.