Resource Exhaustion Quotes

The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of everyone else's money.

We are consuming our forests three times faster than they are being reproduced. Some of the richest timber lands of this continent have already been destroyed, and not replaced, and other vast areas are on the verge of destruction. Yet forests, unlike mines, can be so handled as to yield the best results of use, without exhaustion, just like grain fields.

Apparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our oil and coal reserves.

Exploration of closer planets will continue. Only after he exhausts all the resources here on earth will man go further ahead, which is when interplanetary travel may take place.

Why would even I say we can't stop drilling in the Gulf? Because we have no alternatives. Whether or not we drill in the Gulf, or in Alaska, we will continue to wring the last out of anyplace else.

Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.

A significant number of petroleum geologists believe that we will reach the global maximum of petroleum extraction within this decade or that we have already reached it. Peak Oil happened in 1970 in America, when over half of our oil that we gained from the soil was exhausted ... This is very disturbing, regardless of global warming.

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995.

Where there are few people, and a great quantity of fertile land, the power of the earth to afford a yearly increase of food may be compared to a great reservoir of water, supplied by a moderate stream. The faster population increases, the more help will be got to draw off the water, and consequently an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But the sooner, undoubtedly, will the reservoir be exhausted, and the streams only remain.

Oil production should peak out around the world in the early 1990s...That means in five years' time we may have chewed up most of the possibility of further expansion of oil production.

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

The Age of Oil has really exhausted its usefulness, and it has actually become a danger to our lives and our ability to survive on the planet.

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.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

There are no more new worlds. The unoccupied arable lands of the earth are limited, and will soon be taken.

The North Sea was supposed to run out in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s. And now production is still on-line.

The total exports of the entire Arab world, not counting oil and gas, amount to less than Finland, one tiny European country… their economies depend entirely on oil…. Sooner or later, oil and gas either be exhausted or superseded as the modern world turns to other sources of energy. When that happens, they will have nothing left. One possibility is that they will develop other forms of economic activity. Another, more likely, is that the region will lapse into insignificance.

The approaching exhaustion of domestic reserves of petroleum and the rapid depletion of world reserves will have a profound effect on Americans in the cities and on the farms.

The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.

He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.

We have the greatest people on Earth, but they're depleted.

One morning people can wake up and realize there is nothing left to share, that before state property is privatized, all the cream has been skimmed off, and what's left will just be bones.

They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelins or stones with which to attack us.

We have all the cards. Because we're like the piggy bank that everybody keeps stealing from. But pretty soon we're not going to be piggy bank anymore. We're going to be the opposite of the piggy bank.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.