“The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, a Republican, has put together a plan identifying the richest wind sites in Texas for building transmission lines to link those wind sites with the major cities…There will be enough electricity from wind farms to satisfy 60% of the residential needs of the 22 million people living in Texas. And this is in a matter of years – we’re not talking decades.”
“China did its own study of what the impact of climate change would be in China, and the results were really startling. Climate change is going to affect all the areas where China already is most vulnerable: its water supply, flooding, droughts, disease, agriculture.”
“Energy efficiency is going to become the rallying cry, I think, across the country… You just can’t keep building power plants.”
“Somehow the economic theorists got the sign wrong, so we’ve been arguing about cost, burden and sacrifice—when we should be talking about profits, jobs and competitive advantage.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to really attack the climate change problem without addressing the food system. The way we produce food contributes as much as a third of the greenhouse gases that we deal with.”
“Cement is the #1 emitter of CO2 across the entire build environment – much more than steel, glass, aluminum, dry wall put together…You scrape the limestone out of the ground. You crush it – huge energy. You put it into a gigantic oven at thousands of degrees Fahrenheit for a long time, and you cook it. Then you pulverize it all over again. Every ton – and there are 2.6 billion tons of cement made every year – generates just about 1 ton of CO2.”
“I must be very honest and very clear. The only way for us and the world is a higher tax on CO2 emissions, on CO2, on gas, on oil, and less tax for all kinds of renewables. You need a carrot and you need a whip to make a change.”
“For the traveler, very quickly we’re seeing the train take the reins from the plane. The traveler can relax, he doesn’t have to wait. There are no security lines, he knows he’ll arrive on time, and he can even work on the train. So the traveler is convinced very quickly.”
“People quite often ask me this: “Do you want to cover the world with mirrors?” And the answer is no. We need less than 1% of the Sahara Desert to supply the whole electricity demand of the world today.”
“We’ve got maybe ten years, some say less, in which to turn things around. That’s damn little time… I think we can change very, very, quickly. We’ve shown historically that we’re capable of it… if people really understand the imperative for change.”
“We are part of family, okay? The globe is a family. Because, although you may think that what you do will not affect me, but in reality, we… affect each other every day.”
