Fatih Birol Quotes

The automotive X Prize, to a great degree, is focused on addressing petroleum usage and carbon emissions.

The Volkswagen Group offers the world's largest low-CO2 fleet.

Automobile efficiency is the ballgame of energy security of the country.

People will buy a good electrical car instead of buying a fossil-fuel one, and you get a much better standard of car.

I've always been a strong supporter of environmental protection and initiatives in that area. But I'm willing to set priorities. If we have to make reductions in one place, we'll have to-in order to increase another place, I'm willing to do that.

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.

China has adopted and is implementing its national climate change program. This includes mandatory national targets for reducing energy intensity and discharge of major pollutants and increasing forest coverage and the share of renewable energy for the period of 2005 through 2010.

I have advocated an entirely different approach than cap and tax, which would be worldwide in application and which emphasizes technology as a way of reducing total emissions.

We need a number of solutions - we need more efficiency and conservation. Efficiency is a big one. I think car companies need to do a lot better in producing more efficient cars. They have the technology, we just need to demand them as consumers.

Some people say hybrid vehicles such as the Prius are only a bridge to the future ... but we think it could be a long bridge and a very sturdy one. There are many more gains we can achieve with hybrids.

Unlike fuel-economy standards, the most common method of reducing demand for oil over the past thirty years, a gas tax doesn't tell people what kind of car to drive. It simply raises the price of gasoline and lets people adjust their behavior accordingly.

The only way people are going to change their car buying habits, and the only way government will get behind alternatively fueled vehicles, is if gasoline prices continue to go up.

With all the hybrid stuff and things like that, I think that's a fabulous direction to go with cars in that sense. As someone who grew up around muscle cars, I'll never not be able to not love a muscle car. Not that I don't care about the environment, that's not it. But I adore muscle cars.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

I love driving. I still drive a 1993 Toyota Camry. I do want to get an electric car, but it's less of a carbon footprint if you keep your old, fuel-efficient car on the road than if you say 'build me a whole new car.'

I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book.

I wish people would spend their money on hybrid cars.

In addition to this, they already have a fuel cell car on the road in Japan. It is subsidized from within the corporation because they are still at a high cost.

Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm, but it's going to be a gradual improvement.

If you tell people, 'that old banger of yours, we're going to tax the hell out of it,' they'll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say 'fair enough.'

I was encouraged to hear that GM has made great progress on the hydrogen car.

The European auto industry made a commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an average of 140 grams per kilometer. But then there was a significant change in what customers wanted in their vehicles.

Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option...they will become a necessity.

Let's give people more incentives to get fuel efficient vehicles.

We have been very reluctant to make statements about where the industry is going to go. The Wrangler is going hybrid in 2020. We don't make much noise about that, but it will happen.