Caroline Lucas Quotes

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

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

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.

It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.

[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.

The growing evidence of climate change is forcing attention on carbon emissions and their reduction.

Fracking locks the U.K. into an industry that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to renewables.

If you're serious about climate targets, you don't build and expand the oil sands and move from coal-fired electricity to inefficient fracked gas.

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.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

The problem with cap-and-trade and programs such as carbon capture and storage is that they all assume that business as usual can continue. The financial meltdown and peak oil has pretty much demonstrated that business as usual's not going to work.

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.

Tar sands oil is the dirtiest fuel on Earth. Because producing it consumes so much energy, a gallon of tar sands crude generates 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventional crude oil.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.

The American Republican Party is the last political bastion of the fossil fuel industry - now so in tow to the fossil fuel industry that it cannot face up to the realities of carbon pollution and climate change.

World leaders need to realize that the cost of transforming the global energy system is far less than coping with the consequences of burning the planet's remaining fossil fuels.

We should not only look at the short-term economic benefits of fossil fuels but also at the bad news for climate change. We should therefore not greet the fossil fuel age unconditionally.

We have to be reminded that we still live in a world that relies a lot on fossil fuels, and that transition to new and renewable sources is not always and in all cases possible from one day to the next.

There is no plan today to fully give up on coal. Experts point out that our supplies run for another 200 years, and it would be hard not to use them.

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return

If [climate change ] became a serious proposal in the United States, there would be a huge propaganda onslaught by the business community, the energy corporations and many others, to try to frighten the population into opposing it - claiming that if they have it, all sorts of terrible things will happen, like you won't be able to heat your home, or whatever the story is.

We are on track for a 3.5 deg C rise by 2040 (i.e. 4.2 deg C relative to pre-industrial)... When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius, which would have devastating consequences for the planet. We have 5 years to change the energy system, or have it changed

The flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do.