Latest Denis Hayes Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian.

  Denis Hayes

  Optimism, Parental, Faith Based

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• As a student of conservation biology, I believe that characteristics with survival value will ultimately prevail. There is no survival value in pessimism. If you think failure is inevitable, that view will probably become self-fulfilling.

  Denis Hayes

  Believe, Thinking, Self

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Our goal is to turn solar electric technologies into a commodity business like computer chips, and make them ubiquitous in the built environment. I'd couple this with a huge commitment to fundamental research in nanostructure to goose the next generation of more efficient, cheaper, dematerialized cells. And if I'm truly czar, I'd emphasize silicon technologies, as that approach is the one least likely to encounter material constraints in supplying an explosive global demand.

  Denis Hayes

  Couple, Commitment, Technology

  Source: therumpus.net

• We need a firm cap on carbon emissions from fossil fuels. No coal, oil, or gas could enter the economy until the buyer had a permit. All permits would be auctioned by the federal government, and the number of permits auctioned would be decreased by three percent per year. Permits could be traded, but they could not be created out of whole cloth by companies that plant forests or dump iron filings at sea.

  Denis Hayes

  Years, Sea, Iron

  Source: therumpus.net

• f the government is going to put money into the automobile sector, it should break up GM and Chrysler as a condition of financial aid, and it should be even-handed in its treatment of start-up firms like Tesla, Miles, Fisker, and others. It would be terrible to kill the entrepreneurs who have taken great risks to bring new automotive technologies to market by pumping tax dollars into the behemoths that have done everything wrong for the last years.

  Denis Hayes

  Taken, Technology, Government

  Source: therumpus.net

• Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.

  Denis Hayes

  Airplane, Half, Speed

  Source: therumpus.net

• An aggressive building performance standard for all new buildings, and a set of performance requirements to be met by all buildings before they can be sold (when upgrades can be included in the new mortgage). These should encompass heating and cooling, lighting, and plug loads. Coupled with new efficiency standards for appliances, lights, and furnaces, this should reduce the energy consumption of new buildings by 50 percent, more or less immediately, and go on from there.

  Denis Hayes

  Light, Energy, Goes On

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Sustainability requires that we demand enduring quality. Steve Strong has a slide presentation pointing out that much of Oxford was built 800 years ago. What are we building today that will be here 800 years from now? If something like that emerged from this recession, it would help justify the hardship so many people are currently experiencing.

  Denis Hayes

  Strong, Years, Oxford

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• I would love to see a fundamental re-thinking of whether we truly want to be the world's largest debtor nation, feeding an insatiable desire for mall-crawling with cheaply made crap from all over the world.

  Denis Hayes

  Thinking, Desire, Debtors

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• he economy favors throughput over quality and craftsmanship, and economists are terrified because the American savings rate has crept upward from about zero to almost five percent. But the mortgage crisis and the burgeoning credit card crisis are causing Americans to become wary of irresponsible debt.

  Denis Hayes

  Zero, Quality, Cards

  Source: therumpus.net

• The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.

  Denis Hayes

  Children, Fall, Past

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• There are a few obvious consequences and perhaps one subtle possibility. One obvious thing is that, to stimulate the economy, President Obama has committed to creating millions of green jobs that will leave a legacy - much as Roosevelt's public works did during the new deal.

  Denis Hayes

  Jobs, Obvious Things, Creating

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Obama wants to build such things as smart electrical grids and high-speed rail lines, which will offer big environmental improvements. Another obvious thing is that large-scale project financing is virtually frozen, so a lot of renewable energy projects are on hold. If the system doesn't get unclogged before the developers run out of cash, they will be cancelled. Money matters, and we are racing against time.

  Denis Hayes

  Running, Smart, Obvious Things

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• With time environmental issues got much more complicated. It is pretty easy, if you know what you are doing, to stop a company from pouring poison into a lake where kids swim. It is much harder to address all the myriad greenhouse gases emitted by different sources - from petrochemical refineries to hundreds of millions of peasants cutting down trees for their incredibly inefficient cook stoves.

  Denis Hayes

  Kids, Cutting, Lakes

  Source: therumpus.net

• That said, I'm embarrassed and furious that so many coal-state Democrats in the U.S. Senate are paralyzing international progress to protect the short term interests of a dying industry that ravages the environment from mine to slag heap.

  Denis Hayes

  Progress, Dying, Coal

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• By 1975 - and continuing to today - all Americans came to believe that they had a "right" to a safe, clean, healthy environment. When I grew up, no one seriously criticized the steel mills and paper mills for the deadly stench they produced - that was the smell of prosperity. In the modern society, no one would tolerate such conditions in an American city.

  Denis Hayes

  Believe, Cities, Smell

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Earth Day gathered up those strands, and dozens more, and knitted them together in the public consciousness as "environmental" issues. The nation was pretty startled when 20 million people hit the streets. Congress, which had adjourned for the day to go back to its districts, was blown away.

  Denis Hayes

  Issues, People, Earth Day

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Pric, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Environmentally, business in America in 1970 was very similar to business in China today. Even if a CEO wanted to be a responsible corporate citizen, he (and they were all "he's" then) simply couldn't invest a billion dollars in pollution controls to produce a product that was indistinguishable from those of his competitors. His products would be priced out of the market. Passing laws that created a clean, level playing field for whole industries had to be a core focus of the 1970s.

  Denis Hayes

  Law, Pollution Control, America

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

• Politicians had always viewed environmental issues as narrow things of no great political consequence. Sort of NIMBY issues. A big part of the reason was that the groups that cared about wilderness didn't talk with the groups that were trying to stop freeways from cutting through inner cities, and neither of them talked to the folks who wanted to stop the military from dumping Agent Orange on Vietnam.

  Denis Hayes

  Military, Cutting, Cities

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.