Quotes About Carbon

Shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's.

I was very much taken with carbon fibers because they seemed like the perfect medium to explore transport studies in carbon-based systems.

Cows and other ruminants are worse polluters than all of the transportation in the world, so all of us who try to cut down our carbon footprint by lessening our transportation would do far better by just consuming less beef.

Cap and trade is an important tool in California's climate policy portfolio. It sends a price signal to industries to reduce their carbon pollution while generating billions of dollars in revenue for investments in clean transportation and direct pollution reduction.

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.

Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon.

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

I'm trying to be as green as I can. As an airline pilot, I have a carbon footprint that's a size 10, so it's pretty hard.

For someone to say that someone's a skeptic or a climate denier about the climate changing, that's just nonsensical. We see that throughout history. We impact the climate by our activity. How much so is very difficult to determine with respect to our CO2 or carbon footprint, but we obviously do.

A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you

And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.

Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it'll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we'll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century.

la estrategia más eficaz para luchar contra el cambio climático consiste en dejar de talar tantos árboles que ya existen.

When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren't fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

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

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%

The typical Kenyan produces 55 times less carbon dioxide than an American, and rural farmers like the Talams produce even less.

Nobody knows of a way to make cement without going through this process. It's a chemical reaction—limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide—and there's no way around it. It's a one-to-one relationship. Make a ton of cement, and you'll get a ton of carbon dioxide.

We already know the emissions number; it's 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn't been firmly established, but it's at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that's the number I'll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year

All these different types of plastics have one thing in common: They contain carbon. Carbon, it turns out, is useful in creating all sorts of different materials because it bonds easily with a wide variety of different elements; in the case of plastics, it's usually clustered with hydrogen and oxygen.