Molly Ivins Quotes

Our planet's lands and oceans are already stretched to meet the demands of 7 billion people. The human population continues to grow. The search for sustainable solutions is an economic and a moral imperative if we are to create the future we want.

Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.

All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption.

When my parents were growing up the world's population was under three billion. During my children's lifetime, it is likely to exceed nine billion. You don't need to be an expert to realise that sustainable development is going to become the greatest challenge we face this century

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

Senator Obama will be taking office at a critical juncture. There are many pressing challenges facing the international community, including the global financial crisis and global warming. We look forward to working closely with President-elect Obama and his team to address these challenges.

We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption.

We want to promote people-to-people exchanges so that China and the United States can really join together, not just to solve the problems of China or the United States, but some of the big problems facing the entire world. From climate change to famine to even terrorism.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.

Along with issues like global warming, I think a problem with the world today is population decline.

Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues.

Climate change does not respect border; it does not respect who you are - rich and poor, small and big. Therefore, this is what we call 'global challenges,' which require global solidarity.

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

To ensure a healthier and more abundant world, we simply must slow the world’s explosive growth in population.

Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality—But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

… the mere notion that there are three times as many people on Earth as there were when I started making television. How can the Earth accommodate them? When people, including politicians, set their faces against looking at the consequences—it’s just unbelievable that anyone could ignore it.

We need to connect the dots between climate, poverty, energy, food and water. These issues cannot be addressed in isolation

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.

Climate change is a global problem. Its impacts do not respect national borders. No nation can deal with it alone. We must all work together, building joint capability to deal with these emerging threats. .

Population needs to be stabilised for sustainable development.

We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.

Curbing pollution and global warming takes a global cooperative mindset. Development aid needs to be rethought in this context.