Desmond Tutu Quotes

Unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels... we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe

The very energy sources that have gotten us to where we are now are also, if we continue doing what we're doing, a shortcut to the end of all that we hold near and dear.

The United States is the biggest spender of oil and of all the planet resources. Oil is a very valuable resource for life - electric heaters. We must have to transition ourselves to a post-oil era.

Society's dependence on fossil fuels is jeopardising social and economic progress.

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

Will we confront climate change in time or will we let fossil fuel companies determine our fate? This is a fight we can't afford to lose, and that's what keeps me moving forward.

We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels.

Thousands of climate scientists agree that global warming is not only the most threatening environmental problem but also one of the greatest challenges facing all of humanity. We must demand a separation between oil and state. We can get off oil and slow global warming.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.

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

When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good - it just needs to be clean energy.

There is hardly an activity that a person can think about that does not intrinsically involve energy, most of which is currently provided by fossil fuels.

Oil has allowed us to think about economics as though energy doesn't matter.

Since 1850, burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas has increased 100 times to produce energy as the world has industrialized to serve the world's more than 6 billion and growing population.

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

I have to have faith that we're going to succeed in transforming where we get our energy from. The big worry is whether or not we're going to do it before it's too late. And I think nobody knows the answer to that.

We are launching a campaign called Wind, Not War, which is about the alternatives to a fossil-fuels-based economy and looking at wind, an alternative energy, as key to that in terms of issues of global climate change as well as issues of democracy.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

With the growing urgency of climate change, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot shout from the rooftops about the dangers of global warming and then turn around and shout even louder about the "dangers" of windmills.

On this 50th Earth Day, we face a crisis unknown to those who gathered on the first Earth Day - the climate crisis.

We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner. If we don't address climate change, we won't be around as humans.

Wind energy can and will play one of the most important roles in saving the world of tomorrow, today.

As investments and as an energy source, fossil fuels have nowhere to go but down.

We don't have all the time in the world with oil. We have to use oil while it makes sense to do so.