David J. C. MacKay Quotes

If England became a world power, it was because of the industrial revolution.

You can’t mine coal with bayonets!

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

When you brought the Industrial Revolution in, all of a sudden India and China went from being the dominant global powers to being powers dominated by those who understood how to apply this new technology.

Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.

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

Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.

The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold.

We are already witnessing a transformation in the U.S. economy to increased production of lower carbon energy through fuel switching to natural gas and expansion of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable non-carbon intensive energy sources.

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.

On a per capita basis, Britain is responsible for more of the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere than any other nation on Earth because it has been burning it from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.

For some reason, on that sparkling afternoon last week, I actually saw the coal that was passing by and it set me to thinking how important coal was to our everyday lives when I was a little boy.

[Coal is] a 19th-century fuel very badly suited for the 21st century. There's no way you can wash or scrub coal to make that essential fact go away.

In my mind globalization means returning the industrial revolution back to square one.

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

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.