Sustainability Quotes

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.

The main thing that's missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.

The climate is like a bathtub that's slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That's the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions-but not eliminate them-won't do it.

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.

Not only will atomic power be released, but someday we will harness the rise and fall of the tides and imprison the rays of the sun.

I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

I have had a lot of success with failure.