Richard Heinberg famous quotes

05-19-2025

Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Struggle #Ecosystems #Oil
If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Ecosystems #People #Support
...the era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system
-- Richard Heinberg

#Oil #America #Eras
We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Years #Profound #Effort
Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Thinking #People #Environmental
When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Environmental #Levels #Hawks
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Competition #Environmental #Events
Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Growth #Done #Economic
If we aim for what is no longer possible, we will achieve only delusion and frustration. But if we aim for genuinely worthwhile goals that can be attained, then even if we have less energy at our command and fewer material goods available, we might nevertheless still increase our satisfaction in life.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Frustration #Goal #Earth Day
What's new is high oil prices and the economy hates high oil prices.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Hate #Oil #Economy
As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda--the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government--in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Government #Goal #Political
The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Past #Self #Law
The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Real #Simple #Oil
Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.
-- Richard Heinberg

#Oil #Impact #Environmental

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