Fossil Fuels Quotes

“Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”
― Naomi Klein

“Tomorrow’s beef and dairy industries may face the same existential challenges as today’s fossil fuel industry.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.”
― Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems

“As long as we're tied to Middle Eastern oil we're tied to Middle Eastern politics. We're hostages to the terrorists and nutcases who want to wipe out Israel and the United States because we support Israel.”
― Ben Bova, Powersat

“The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry.

They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.”
― Michael E. Mann

“All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.”
― Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

“It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people seem to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately to catastrophe: what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out. It has fallen to us, centuries later, to bear witness to the last turn of the wheel. And what we are seeing already -' he paused to point a finger in the direction of the distant wildfires - 'should be enough to remind us that the climatic perturbations of the Little Ice Age were trivial compared to what is in store for us now. What our ancestors experienced is but a pale foreshadowing of what the future holds!”
― Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

“Couldn't it be said that it was in the seventeenth century that we started down the path that has brought us to where we are now? After all, it was then that Londoners began to use coal on a large scale, for heating, which was how our dependence on fossil fuels started. Would your Jacobean playwrights have written as they did if they hadn't had coal fires to warm them? Did they know that an angry beast, which had long lain dormant within the earth, was coming to life? Did Hobbes or Leibniz or any of the other thinkers of the Enlightenment have any understanding of this?”
― Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

“Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it's princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don't want to head down”
― Russell Gold

“Individuals are told to reduce our "carbon footprint," and we should. But how many years of riding a bike to work would it take me to offset one F-15 flying for an hour?”
― Bruce E. Johansen

“[...] obtenir la baisse de notre dépendance aux combustibles fossiles demande de la méthode et de la gestion, et non une croyance aveugle dans des objets techniques particuliers qui seraient nécessairement adaptés partout et tout le temps.”
― Jean-Marc Jancovici, Transition énergétique pour tous : Ce que les politiques n'osent pas vous dire

“A hundred years ago, this City[...]'s energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you’re high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense.”
― Annalee Newitz, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future

“[I]f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period’s prejudices.”
― William T. Vollmann, No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies

“We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“Quiero señalar otra cuestión importante sobre las 29.404 muertes del año 2013. El clima ya no es una de las principales causas de mortalidad, gracias sobre todo a los combustibles fósiles. En cambio, todavía hay mil trescientos millones de personas que viven sin electricidad y una gran mayoría de ellas sufrirán una muerte prematura, un problema que sólo podría resolverse usando más combustibles fósiles. No sólo estamos ignorando la cuestión de conjunto cuando convertimos el cambio climático en la obsesión de nuestra cultura, sino además nos hemos propuesto «combatir» ese cambio climático rechazando el arma que ha reducido su peligrosidad de manera espectacular.

(...)

No hemos recibido un clima seguro y lo hemos transformado en algo peligroso; hemos recibido un clima peligroso y lo hemos convertido en mucho más seguro. La civilización de la energía, y no la metereología, es el eje impulsor de la habitabilidad climática. Pase lo que pase, el clima siempre será peligroso por su propia naturaleza, y la pregunta clave siempre será si poseemos la capacidad de lidiar con él o, mejor aún, si somos capaces de dominarlo.”
― Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

“Sonnet of Renewable Energy

There is a plug point in the sky,
Which is beaming electricity 24/7.
Yet we drill holes into the earth,
To suck oil and power our concrete heaven.
When humankind first started drilling,
They had no idea of its implication.
But eventually scientists raised warnings,
Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution.
Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate,
And we no longer have time for scholarly fight.
So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs,
Come up with affordable home solar-grid.
Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency,
Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“While climate change threatens our environment on the one hand, and fossil fuel depletion threatens our economic system on the other, solar energy holds out the promise of protecting both of them.”
― Mahmood H. Shubbak, Forging Ahead: Technology Development & Emerging Economies

“Cars are environmental enemy number one.

(from an interview in Attitude, 2002)”
― Andy Singer

“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)”
― Melvin McLeod (editor)

“I am not sure that energy company executives who say they want to understand the concerns of Indigenous people can actually do so unless they can grasp the emotional weight and social obligations carried by people who balance on the knife-edge of permanent cultural loss.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice