James Lovelock Quotes

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

In this age of globalization, instant real time media and television, everyone all over the world realizes that high energy usage equates with a high standard of living and wealth.

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate.

Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake.

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing.

The world is changing very profoundly.

In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

I drove an electric car for seven years because of its advanced technology, not because I have any concerns about energy resources. I have none at all. And when environmentalists say that global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and that we'll have a tipping point for atmospheric carbon dioxide, it's just nonsense.

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century

We have changed our environment more quickly than we have learned how to change ourselves.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

The dinosaurs aren't remembered for much more than their bones. When humanity's gone, what do we give to this little planet that we're on, and what could we do collectively, removing the pride?

Nostalgia has become so much more popular because technology and climate change are visibly present. It's easy to idolize the past, before those things were prevalent.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?

The relationship between carbon consumption and human well-being is causal, not coincidental.

I'm fascinated by technology and how it is changing the way we live and view our humanity.

If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.

Experts say this global warming is serious, and they are predicting now that by the year 2050, we will be out of party ice.

I think we're in a 1970s-level moment of social transition and they're always full of upheaval. As violent and deranged as we can be to each other and to other species, we've got nothing on tsunamis, hurricanes or tornadoes.

I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.

The carbon fuels industry-big oil and coal-have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party and they are drilling it for everything it's worth.