Quotes About Environment

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

I didn't think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn't have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment.

Because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There's no getting around physics.

What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%

How much power does it take? The world 5,000 gigawatts The United States 1,000 gigawatts Mid-size city 1 gigawatt Small town 1 megawatt Average American house 1 kilowatt

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.

Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase "government policy" doesn't exactly set people's hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won't get to zero unless we get this right, and we're a long way from doing that. (I'm talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)

Power density is the relevant number here. It tells you how much power you can get from different sources for a given amount of land (or water, if you're putting wind turbines in the ocean). It's measured in watts per square meter. Below

F-gases are extremely powerful contributors to climate change: Over the course of a century, they cause thousands of times more warming than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If you don't hear much about them, it's because they're not a huge percentage of greenhouse gases; in the United States, they represent about 3 percent of emissions.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you'll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It's one of the main reasons why the country is the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world's buildings. And unlike lights and A/C units, most of them run on fossil fuels, not electricity. (Whether you use natural gas, heating oil, or propane depends largely on where you live.)

If you want to do business with us, you'll have to take climate change seriously.

The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years is $2.22. Advanced biofuels for jets, to the extent they're available, cost on average $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium for zero-carbon fuel, then, is the difference between these two prices, which is $3.13.

If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery.

In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions. They help us put our time, attention, and money to their best use. Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren't cheap enough. They help us answer questions like these:

We need to channel the world's passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they're low enough for middle-income countries to pay.

Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

The share of global power that comes from burning coal (roughly 40 percent) hasn't changed in 30 years. Oil and natural gas together have been hovering around 26 percent for three decades. All told, fossil fuels provide two-thirds of the world's electricity. Solar and wind, meanwhile, account for 7 percent.

A hotter climate means there will be more frequent and destructive wildfires.

If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol.

Cities need to change the way they grow. Urban areas are home to more than half the people on earth—a proportion that will rise in the years ahead—and they're responsible for more than three-quarters of the world's economy. As they expand, many of the world's fast-growing cities end up building over floodplains, forests, and wetlands that could absorb rising waters during a storm or hold reservoirs of water during a drought.

It wasn't enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.